


Looking Glass Tumblr Prompts

by Feynite



Series: Looking Glass [5]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Shorts, Tumblr, prompts, vast range of content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 11:53:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 32
Words: 34,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5247314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Looking Glass' related tumblr prompts that don't necessarily fit elsewhere! Includes random shenanigans, OC character shorts, and suchlike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Musing

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Pride with an infant, any infant

He has never seen one in person before, of course.

Mythal’s holdings have not seen a child in hundreds of years, and battlefields and council chambers and not the places for them.

But he sees their reflections in the Fade, sometimes. The Waking born, with their little bodies that grow from other bodies. Tiny, but not like the Children of the Stone. Their proportions are different. Somehow, more endearing. 

He watches their reflections in dreams, when he happens upon them. Little fingers and little feet, high-pitched voices and too-large eyes. The smallest catch his attention for the longest. Round little bodies, and hands that curl into fists, and cries that pull at something in him and make him want to sooth them.

They are only reflections. Only memories. But they react to known things, and he finds a wave of something shiny, or a soft coo - they seems to tumble out of him, unbidden - works to distract them from crying, sometimes. They seem to cry so much.

He understands that. He wept a lot, too, when he got his body, and his did not even need to grow.

Still, he wonders sometimes what it would have been like to be born that way. To learn in the Waking, rather than the Dreaming. To have his traits and drives unknown until he found them for himself.

In an unspoken corner of his mind, he thinks he would have preferred it.


	2. Dancing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Pride daydreams about teaching Lavellan to dance.

He thinks she would be confident.

She is so confident in how she fights, he cannot imagination that he would draw a rare moment of hesitance from her at this task. The steps would not daunt her, nor the challenge. She would not waver in taking his hand - she did not before, after all, and he dwells a moment on the warm feel of her fingers, gripping him so easily - but then, he thinks, when he drew her close, there would be a pause.

She would not be quite sure how to progress. And they would be standing so near, and his hand would be on her waist, and hers would be on his shoulder. A flicker of uncertainty would cross her expression, and he would smile and begin to show her the steps. Lead her through it.

It would not take her long to master the basics. Or, perhaps it would. Perhaps the fluidity of dancing and the fluidity of combat would be too awkward of a shift for her, at first, and she would be stiff where she should go fluid, and too tense, and he would have to make her relax. Make her laugh. Make her see that she did not have to worry about things so much when he was there, and could simply have fun.

Once she had mastered the basics, then they would move on to  more complex styles. Rapid. Close. He would lift her and she would put her arms onto his shoulders, and for a moment they would be near enough to kiss.

He would twirl her, and dip her, and they would be near enough once more.

When at last they finished, they would still be standing too close.

“We have danced,” she would say.

“So we have,” he would reply.

The words would barely be out of his mouth before she would kiss him. She would kiss him with urgency, maybe even with impatience; she would be warm and soft and… and probably wet, because it would be their mouths after all. Maybe tongues would be involved. He hopes that kind of thing is intuitive.

The heat rises in his cheeks, and he blinks the thought away. They are miles below ground and in hostile territory. It is hardly the time for daydreams, he reminds himself. Hardly the time at all.


	3. Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Something from the Spirit of Love's POV

Love hurts, sometimes.

Not in and of itself, and it never wants to. But love is attachment. Love is the warmth that builds up and pours out of people, and roots itself in outside things; in dreams, and in others, and even in places. It reaches and stretches, invisible red strings that tie everyone to the world. The strongest ones are unbreakable.

But unbreakable strands can be caught up, and drag the people tied to them into sharp corners, and over unfriendly ground. They do not snap; they cannot be escaped, until death finally drags one end or both into the quiet stillness out of reach, and the strand follows after; reaching into the far distance. So they are dangerous, the unbreakable ones.

Love knows. She will always love him.

But Love does not often see  _this._

The strands are between them, Love thinks; but also not. Her love is for him, and not for him. It reaches out into the darkness, and  _branches_  into the man beside her. Confusion? But no, though she might be confused, there are other strands, too. Tiny, tenuous things, faint but growing, perhaps. They are not part of the vanishing strand. They reach between just these two.

New love that is also old love; unbreakable love, but it’s just beginning?

How?

That alone is something to see. But Love  _feels_  it, too, and oh, it has been painful. Sharp jaws clamped down on an unbreakable strand, and the beast ran, charging through grief and despair. Pain and loss, and sacrifice. How tired the heart at the end of that tether must be, to have been dragged so.

It is amazing she is alive.

It is amazing she can make new threads, and reach to this one who is-and-is-not familiar to her, somehow.

Love sighs, and reaches, and tries to pull up the good feelings past the hurt. The ones that made the tether so strong. That is what is important. That is what can heal, though starting to try might hurt as well. But the hurting is not the point. It is just something that can happen.

Love is never the part that hurts. If she will always love him, she must remember what that felt like; or she will always hurt, and she will not know what to do with these new strands, and he will hurt, too.

Love really wishes they would stay for longer, because this is going to take a lot of work.


	4. Gifts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Pride trying to decide on a gift for Lavellan.

He has never seen her indulge in any art form.

It is a strange thought, and when he has it, it will not leave him alone. He supposes, with the issue of mortality, that there is simply not time in her world for people to dedicate decades to learning things that do not have to do with survival. Perhaps that is why she is so disquieted with beautiful things; perhaps she has rarely seen them before.

It seems a sad thing to him, though, that he has never seen her make something with her own hands. And then he finds himself dwelling on the idea of  _having_  something she has made. Presumptuous, perhaps, but if she made something for him… he wonders what it would be like. What her mind would create.

He finds himself asking her about it.

“Do you know any arts?” he wonders.

She glances at him, and shrugs.

“I can carve, a little,” she admits.

“Stone?”

She laughs.

“No; wood.”

The next day, he takes off, scouring the market places and the traders’ stalls, haggling and bargaining until he has procured several large blocks of the best carver’s wood available, and a full kit of elegant tools. It takes him the better part of the day to locate a set that is not too flashy, not filled with crystal blades or gold-inlaid handles - the best he manages is ivory, technically ‘unfinished’, as a layer of gemstones had yet to be sealed into the bases of the blades.

He considers his offerings carefully.

A gift for her.

And perhaps, if he is lucky, a gift for him as well.


	5. Sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Pride getting a dwarven sweet treat from Lavellan.

“It could be poisoned,” Pride says.

Curiosity pops another one into her mouth, and waits, a look of concentration on her face.

“Curiosity!” he snaps.

“Not poisoned!”

“That is  _not_  how you are supposed to check for poison!”

With that seal of a approval, she finds she can finally reach for the platter of sweets - offered rather begrudgingly with their evening meal - without receiving a forestalling touch to the shoulder.

They are little balls of cake, covered in powdered sugar. When she bites into one she finds that it is light and fluffy, and that the middle is filled with a sweet, smooth jelly that she recognizes the taste of.

It brings her up short.

“What? What is wrong?” Pride asks her.

“I know that taste,” she says.

He pauses, uncertain, obviously not expecting that answer.

She swallows a little more carefully. The jelly inside is one Dagna used to get jars of it shipped to Skyhold. She remembers the first time she can upon the entirety of the fortress dwarven population - even Varric - gathered around the crates, offering her various things in effort to secure at least one jar for themselves.

Upon politely inquiring as to just what was so appealing about these preserves, she had found herself unceremoniously shoved into a chair and offered a tiny amount of it, spread over a cracker. It was impossibly smooth, like honey, but thick, sweet and with an odd tang that seemed perilously addictive.

It was made, she had been told, in Orzammar, by a rare breed of beetle that lived deep underground, and produced a sticky sap by chewing up a certain kind of mushroom.  _Mushroom beetle jelly_  did not sound appealing, but of course, most food is quite strange when broken down like that.

She lets out a tiny, surprised laugh.

Pride stares at her.

“Here,” she says, and plucks another one off the plate. She holds it up to him. “You will like it. I promise.”

He blinks, and for a half a second she almost thinks he’s going to try and bite the cake straight from her fingers. But then he colours, and plucks it out of her grasp instead, and wordlessly pops it into his mouth.

After a second, his eyes widen.

“Oh,” he says.

The appreciative timbre of his voice makes her insides twist, and not, for once, unpleasantly.

Pride smiles with sugar-coated lips.

“You are right; I like it,” he agrees.


	6. Puzzles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Haninan's POV on the beginning of chapter 12.

Pieces can be like letters. Move them around and the same ones can form entirely different words. They can make things work, like spells, brought together to serve form and function. They can stand like pillars, supporting the weight of a great burden; buckling under the strain.

Know where the pieces fit, and you see the picture. But there is almost never just  _one_  possible picture, because nearly every piece can serve more than one purpose.

He has never been entirely sure of where the piece labelled ‘Haninan’ was meant to fit.

He thought he knew, once. He thought he was meant to fit with his family. His clan. But if that had been true, then he would not have failed them all so grievously.

He knows what it would be like to want to go back in time.

Pity that it apparently dooms the world to try.

In Puzzle’s story, though, he sees himself fit in as a piece of the tale; next to the young wolf who seals off the Dreaming. Imprisons his son. Haninan can put it together perfectly, in fact, as she describes events. Wolfling seeks knowledge, and he has always been at the mercy of children looking for wisdom. Whenever or however they met, it would have been tempting to take Pride under his wing.

But he would never have let his son be locked away.

Too many prisons already for their family. His boy would undoubtedly deserve it, but that would not matter, not in the end. Haninan was the one who failed him. Always failed him; failed to guide him, failed to protect him. Failed to reach him.

Poor Puzzle loves the same way he does.

He will not tell her, he decides, that if her wild wolf used his knowledge to make a prison for his son, and Haninan did not tear it down himself, then the clearest picture it paints is one where the thread of his life was severed between a wolf’s jaws.

It is only one possible picture, after all.


	7. Friendfiction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From this exchange:
> 
> Anonymous asked:  
> I am so very down for that fairytale setting. I bet Pride would be, too.
> 
> feynites answered:  
> It’s like, now I’m starting to think that if Pride ever wrote friendfiction, this is what he would write. XD
> 
> helen0rz:  
> @feynites would Pride write himself differently in his own friendfiction? Like he takes on a different persons or have a strong trait, such as much more assertive about courting and etc? (I’m totally thinking friendfiction Tina from bob’s burgers lol!)

*Curiosity clears her throat and holds a piece of parchment up really high while Pride tries desperately to reach for it*

Curiosity: “Fen’Harel was very clever, and was busily concocting a plan to out-wit the overbearing huntress who demanded his virtue, and the skulking contender who would have stolen his life. Lightning quick, the pieces of it came together, and he opened his mouth-”

Pride: “ _Curiosity!”_

Curiosity: “-only to pause, as a new figure burst onto the scene. The most beautiful warrior Fen’Harel had ever seen strode into the clearing, as bold as daylight even in the presence of bickering gods. She was no divine thing, but for a moment, Fen’Harel almost mistook her for one. To the wolf’s amazement, she stood between him and his enemies, and drew her blade-”

Pride: “Curiosity  _this is private!” *_ scrambles to take page back*

Curiosity: *fights and wrestles and only manages to get away with the bottom half* 

Pride: “Give!”

Curiosity: “No! ’I could have handled them myself,’ said Fen’Harel, and then he told the warrior of his plan. She agreed that it was brilliant, and a new sort of admiration drifted into her gaze. Her skin, still slick with sweat, glittered in the sunlight. She looked at Fen’Harel, and licked her lips-”

Pride: “CURIOSITY! I WILL TELL MYTHAL!”

Curiosity: “Good, I think she would like to read this story! Oh, ooh, I like this bit! ‘Perhaps repayment is in order, even so, for your kind deed,’ said Fen’Harel, and he sauntered towards his rescuer. The beautiful warrior blinked, taken aback by his bold implication. Lest she misunderstand, he reached towards her, and trailed a pointed touch across her forearm-”

Pride: *finally gets the last half of the page away from her*

Lavellan: …

Pride: “…it’s a  _legend.”_


	8. Adoption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Curiosity adopting an orphaned baby nug? ... :) Or a DRAGON, DRAGON IS MUCH BETTER!

There is something in Curiosity’s arms.

This, of course, is not at all unusual. Curiosity is often holding things. Even - or perhaps especially - squirming, animal-type things. But this one makes her stall, makes her stop mid-step, and wonder if she maybe shouldn’t go and… find someone?

“He was in the mountains!” Curiosity tells her, excitedly. “His mother died. And his father, it was very sad. But he likes me! I have been feeding him mice.”

The baby griffon stares out from Curiosity’s arms, all tufty fur and crooked grey feathers, and downy fluff. Sharp little beak and angry eyes that manage to look adorable despite their innate, predatory gleam. Little black talons grip through Curiosity’s clothes. They seem to have pretty much ruined the sleeves beneath them, and left behind a field of angry red scratches, too.

Curiosity doesn’t seem to mind in the least.

Baby griffon opens his tiny little beak and lets out a proprietary-sounding shriek, and then burrows down in the arms holding him and peers at her, narrowly. He shakes his wings a bit, and some downy fluff flies off of them. This distracts him, and he makes a strange little purling sound, and then snaps his beaks at one of the tufts.

He coughs.

This is probably a terrible idea. For so, so many reasons.

“Can I hold him?” she asks.

“Of course!” Curiosity replies. “I think I am going to call him Scratches.”

As it turns out, it’s a very apt name.


	9. Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Can I prompt you for something involving Haninan, his wife, and little June because I feel like getting my heart ripped out, please?

June is very small.

Haninan thinks he must be smaller than most children, even though his kin assure him that the boy is of average size. But he is small on Haninan’s shoulders, where his little legs kick as they walk along the forest trails; and he very,  _very_  small upon his mother’s back, where he nestles amidst gleaming scales, and begs her to fly. Laughs upon the wind when she jumps up; but never goes higher than a few feet. And even then, only over fields rich with soft grass and flowers.

She has never dropped June. In a thousand years, Haninan does not think she ever would.

But she thinks their son is small, too. So even when June reaches tiny hands towards the heavens, and begs her to let him brush his fingers across the sun, she keeps him well below the clouds.

June only sighs, in the end; a tremendous breath of disappointment expelled from his tiny chest; a breath that shakes his whole body when he slips down his mother’s neck, past the soft curl of her horns, and winds his arms around her snout.

She huffs at him.

He giggles.

Every parent seems to believe their child is destined for greatness. Haninan knows his son will reach for it, one day. Those grasping hands will not be so small, and he will find wings of his own to carry him. 

But for now, his parents are content to keep him safe below the clouds.


	10. Dreams (NSFW)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt requesting Pride having a wet dream. Merged with the friendfiction short!

The Dreaming is a place shaped by thought, and spirits, and the Waking world, and its own strange currents and streams. Pride has had many sorts of dreams before.

This one is a first.

He dreams of himself as a wolf.

Not at all unusual there.

He is a great white wolf, in a forest grove. The trees are old and faded, overgrown with crystal and glass in places. Flowers bloom in tangled rows around the border. He hunts something, something he’s not sure of - or… or maybe it’s that something hunts  _him_. When he steps into the grove, a trap is sprung; and he is caught.

Then Andruil appears.

It’s a nightmare, then. He’s heard of what Andruil does to her prey. She’s dressed a little strangely - in old fashions, hazy and drifting, like an imagined figure; and sometimes her face is clear, and sometimes she seems more indistinct. A huntress in general, rather than a person in specific.

He is caught up enough in the dream that he doesn’t quite think he can break it. He’s still too close to his body in the waking world, it seems; too muddled between the planes. He resigns himself to unpleasantness.

“For your trespass, I will have you serve me in bed for a year and a day,” the huntress tells him.

His gut twists at the prospect of being made an unwilling bed partner. Even in a dream.

A new figure slinks out of the darkness, then. Vicious and sharp. One of the Nameless; or not. A shade, a phantom, a dark reflection of the huntress before him.

“His trespass against me is all the greater, and longer standing,” says the wraith. “I would have his head.”

The huntress sneers.

“None may take my quarry from me. If you would have his head, you may catch him yourself after I am through with him,” she declares.

“As if I would wait so long,” the wraith replies.

There is an opportunity here, he thinks. This is like a story he knows, though he can only just barely recall the specifics of it. Some old legend. But even without that understanding, the solution is obvious - set them against one another until he wakes up.

He opens his mouth to speak.

A third figure enters the clearing.

This one he knows, too, and the sight of her shocks him into stillness.

She is dressed in armour. Gleaming, smooth and simple, covering her vital regions except for - inexplicably - her midriff. A small skirt sways about her hips. The rest of her is unclothed, leaving bare flesh open to the air in the gaps between the plating she wears.

There is a naked blade in her hand.

“Neither of you shall touch him,” she says. “This majestic wolf deserves to be free!”

She puts her back towards him, and he sees that she has neglected sufficient back-plating as well. Only a few tiny leather strips impede his view of the broad expanse of skin as the two other figures charge her, and she meets them head-on; countering the huntress’s knives and the wraith’s spells, cleaving through blade and magic alike. Her skirt sways around her hips, just barely making it past the curve of her backside, and she keeps her legs in a firm, practical stance that gives him an excellent view of her thighs. The muscles of her shoulders flex with every swing.

He swallows, and finds himself at an utter loss to do anything but watch as she dispatches his foes for him.

When it’s finished, she’s panting with exertion and glistening with sweat, her chest heaving a little more dramatically than it probably should. In armour. And all.

She turns towards him, and cuts his bindings.

“There,” she says, with a kind smile. “You are free.”

As the trap fades, he finds that he is suddenly desperately uncomfortable with remaining as a wolf; the air shimmers, and he turns into himself again.

“Thank you!” he exclaims.

Her eyes widen, and she blinks at him. 

Slowly her gaze trails up his form. She licks her lips. The implication is blatant; but after a moment, she ducks her head, embarrassed instead.

“Forgive me. I did not realize you were hiding so handsome a form,” she says.

“And I did not expect to meet so lovely a rescuer,” he replies.

In a fit of boldness, he reaches out, and trails his touch across her forearm.

She blinks at him,

“Oh,” she says.

“Perhaps there is… some way I could repay you?” he suggests.

Her expression falls.

Reaching out, she takes his hand.

“I would never presume to ask you for such a thing,” she tells him. “That vile huntress would have taken you against your will! I shan’t coerce similar payment from you, no matter how tempting your form may be. I am no brute, no matter my strength.”

He feels a rush of warmth run through him, and curls his other hand over top of her own.

“Forgive me; I should not have phrased my suggestion so crudely,” he replies. “What I mean to say is… would you like to celebrate your recent victory with me?”

She regards him for a moment.

Then her mouth curls, and she leans up and kisses him.

He presses his lips gently against hers. There’s something he should do with his tongue, he thinks, but the notion only flits half-formed through his mind and then vanishes. He’s not sure how that’s supposed to be pleasant.

She reaches up, and knocks the fur mantle from his shoulders, and starts undressing him in short order. With a flourish she yanks down his shirt, and then she trails kisses down his neck, and licks at his nipples.

Things go a little… vague at that point. He puts his hands on her, and somehow she goes from clothed to fully naked. She is warm. Firm in some places, and soft in others.

He slides his fingers in her, or at least he means to - he gets them in the right region, at least, and she pushes him to the ground and climbs over him. All of her is stretched out above him, her skin glistening in the light. She kisses him, a lot, and moans, and tells him he’s magnificent. Her hand closes around his erection, and…

He wakes up, panting and sweating. His blankets are clinging to his legs, and he is painfully hard, and for a moment, painfully disoriented as well.

Then he lets out a long, shaky breath.

Oh.

An erotic dream.

He swallows, and wonders if that was impolite of him.

And then he wonders if it’s even more impolite of him to keep picturing that outfit as he slides his hand down beneath his sheets.


	11. Naked in the Moonlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: May I prompt 'frolicking naked in the moonlight'? Prefered with Pride/Lavellan (something 'romantic'/ fluffy (certainly blushy xD)) or them with Curiosity frolicking and watched by Haninan and/or Dorian!! (And Solas!! Omg xD) or both promts <3

It’s a  _myth._

Elves frolicking naked under the moonlight is  _a myth._  Or a joke. It’s something out-of-touch humans believe, and whisper to one another at fancy dinner parties, as they speculate on wild Dalish orgies and over-sexualized elves, and amuse themselves with their own perceived superiority even as they shiver with excitement at the thought of such ‘savagery’.

Except, apparently, it’s not a myth.

Because ‘frolicking naked under the moonlight’ is a pretty good description of how the denizens of Mythal’s palace celebrate their summer solstice.

“It is entirely optional,” Pride assures her, for the fifth time. “Both the dancing and the, um, the clothing levels. Usually I am a wolf for it. Technically I am naked as a wolf, so. Um…” he trails off.

“It is fine,” she replies. “I believe I will politely abstain from the festivities.”

He nods, accepting, his face bright with colour.

That is the precise point when Curiosity comes flying down the corridor between them. Not as a parrot or a lion, but as a tall and distinctly nude elf. The only article of clothing on her is a feather-strewn necklace.

A lot of bare flesh is on display.

“I am so excited to have a body for this!” Curiosity declares, with a whoop of joy, before racing out into the garden.

There is a moment of silence, followed by the distant sound of music from outside.

Slowly, Pride lowers his face into his hands.

“Would you like to come and hide in the library with me?” she offers.

“Yes. Very much so,” he readily agrees.


	12. Barkspawn and Griffon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by this post I made (and interest in it):
> 
> Just imagine, though. The Warden. In ancient Elvhenan.  
> With the griffons.  
> (Imagine also the Warden brings their mabari with them - because of course - and the mabari gets super jealous of the griffons, like, okay it can fly, sure, but how many dragons has it helped kill?! Not even one, probably. And then the griffon is all ‘you are just jealous because I am the most fantastic’ and they keep snapping at one another.)  
> (And then disaster strikes and the griffon and mabari have to team up together and by the end they’re best friends.)  
> (Like Legolas and Gimli.)  
> (Except it’s a griffon and a dog.)

Barkspawn is not always sure what to make of this new place.

It’s different than last, obviously. Very different. Shinier, and people tend to get more angry about him peeing on monuments, for some reason. Not Partner, of course. Partner doesn’t get angry. But the elves-who-are-different do. Barkspawn thinks they need to learn the value of scent marking. Everything smells… empty. Like after a really heavy electric storm.

But life is okay. It’s Barkspawn and Partner and Other People, and some of the Other People are on Barkspawn’s Approved Persons List, and some might get there if they work hard and fight darkspawns and give treats. There are monsters to fight and things to chew, and there is food to be eaten. And there is Partner. This is what Barkspawn needs.

And then it happens.

 _She_  turns up.

She is big, but Barkspawn is still pretty sure he could take her in a fight. And she is pale, and elegant, and smells like a bird and a cat, and has wings. Griffon.

Partner loves her.

Partner gets to fly around on her back, where Barkspawn cannot fit, and people talk about how Partner and Griffon have a ‘special bond’, the kind that only Griffons can make with someone, the kind that’s supposed to be  _sacred._

This is ridiculous, of course.

Everyone knows that  _mabari_  bonds are only sacred ones. That is why Barkspawn is Barkspawn, and Partner is Partner. Perhaps griffons do something similar, but if so, the matter is fairly clear.

Barkspawn saw Partner  _first._

Griffon stares at Barkspawn from where Partner is climbing onto her back, as if she knows his thoughts, and tilts her chin haughtily.  _You may have been first, but I happen to be_ _better_ , her expression says.

How many dragons has Griffon fought? That’s what Barkspawn would like to know. How many darkspawns? Probably not even  _one_  archdemon. Barkspawn has fought practically almost more than one by now. Griffon just sits in fluffy mountains and plays at being all fancy, but when the fighting happens, who is on the battlefield with Partner? Barkspawn, that’s who.

Barkspawn doesn’t need to prove anything.

Griffon is just a fancy flash in the pan. Like a shiny new chew toy.

They’ll see. Barkspawn will wait. Barkspawn will sit here and wait until Partner gets back. Every time.

And also maybe cry a little.

But only for Partner! Because Partner needs Barkspawn to be safe, after all.

No one is jealous.

Barkspawn watches the sky and hates stupid Griffon.

When stupid Griffon comes back  _alone_ , Barkspawn hates her  _even more._

Where is Partner?!

Other People stop Griffon, but she is snapping and injured, and radiating distress. Barkspawn peers at her hide and sees dragon slashes, and smells dragon on Griffon’s hide.

No!

Stupid Griffon has left Partner alone fighting dragons!

Barkspawn barks, angrily, and Griffon hisses and snaps, and the Other People try and boss them around, but there are no Approved Other People here, so Barkspawn ignores them. There is no time to waste telling off Griffon, either. There are dragons that must be fought and Partner to be rescued!

Barkspawn takes off to follow the scent of dragon, but the scent of dragon is only on Griffon.

He stops, confused and frustrated. Flying. They fly through the air; Barkspawn cannot follow scents up so high. Where is Partner? Where are dragons?

Griffon.

Griffon knows.

Barkspawn snarls, and turns, and goes back to stupid Griffon. The Other People have left her alone for now, and are talking among themselves, trying to figure out what happened to Partner. This is obvious, but Barkspawn is used to Other People being stupid sometimes. He barks at Griffon, and Griffon hisses back.

But Griffon must tell him. Where is Partner? Where is dragons? Barkspawn will help!

Griffon snaps her beak.

Then she stops, and considers. Tilts her head.

 _Does Dog really know how to fight dragons?_  she seems to wonder.

Of course Barkspawn knows! Barkspawn has fought many, many dragons! So many dragons. Practically one every day! For years!

Griffon is not sure she believes him.

But Partner is in danger.

Their path is obvious.

Griffon points the direction that they need to go in, and Barkspawn takes off; barking, so the others will know to follow, if they are clever enough to figure it out. Cheese and Backpack and Witchy would have figured it out, and Cookies, probably, but these others are all  _much_  dumber.

He runs and runs and then he realizes that Griffon is coming, too. Flying overhead.

He supposes it is a little admirable. Dragon gashes hurt.

Would be more admirable if she had not left Partner to fight dragons  _alone_.

Although… it is useful. Barkspawn follows the shadow of Griffon flying from the ground, and jumps over logs and stones and through forests, and gets really mucky, which is nice. He runs until he needs to stop for a drink, and then he runs some more, and he thinks he might need to rest, but no.

There are dragons to be fought!

Maybe also darkspawns!

But then they get to a place that is too steep for Barkspawn to climb. He tries, but no matter how he jumps or scrambles, he only slides back down. Griffon swoops by and he whines, frustrated. He will have to go around. An unacceptable delay!

Then Griffon flies down, and picks Barkspawn up in with her legs.

At first he is very angry about this. It is like being picked up by dragons! Not fun! But then he barks and Griffon hisses and he thinks she will drop him, and that would also be bad. So he stops.

And it is…

…It is maybe not so bad, to be flying.

Barkspawn lets his tongue loll out and taste the wind.

Griffon sneezes at him in amusement.

He does not look funny! This is very  _practical_  behaviour!

They pass over rocks, and then Griffon needs to rest, because Barkspawn is very heavy with muscles and mabari strength.

But he can smell them properly, now.

Dragons!

While Griffon catches her breath, Barkspawn charges ahead, tracing the scent up rocky paths and over boulders. And he barks, so Partner will know he is coming! He is coming, Partner! Do not fight dragons without Barkspawn!

Something makes snap-hiss noise, and Barkspawn bares his teeth, and there is dragons! Little dragons! Barely bigger than Barkspawn, yet, but still with fierce fangs and claws, and tough scales. Barkspawn goes for their soft parts, and rends, and covers himself in their blood until they are all dead and twitching.

Wings flap, and Griffon lands, and looks down at his spoils.

He is filthy and not tidy or dignified, she seems to think.

But she also looks impressed.

Well.

Barkspawn was not lying!

He barks again, and Griffon hisses, and they press through the mountain pass. They find more little dragons, and kill them together. Griffon’s beak is very sharp, and her talons rend, and the she can also lift things and drop them. Her wings are very strong.

It will do, Barkspawn supposes.

And then they find Partner, with - of course - the biggest dragon.

Dragon is bleeding, but so is Partner. Barkspawn barks, and Partner calls, and then battle is upon them! Dragon tries to catch Barkspawn, but even though he is tired, now, Barkspawn is still too quick. He dashes between talons and lunges for Dragon’s throat, and fills the air with barking and snarling to let Dragon know that it does not matter how big and tough and scary it is. Barkspawn has seen bigger and tougher and scarier, and bit them all before!

Dragon roars and that is very ouch, because magic hurts Barkspawn’s skin. But then Griffon swoops down and uses her talons and claws at Dragon’s eyes, and Partner is there, and Dragon does not last long after that.

Dragon falls over, bleeding and dead.

Barkspawn falls over, too, and is bleeding as well.

Barkspawn is very tired now.

Partner is there, though. Partner holds Barkspawn and Barkspawn licks Partner’s hand, and there is Griffon, and maybe Griffon is not so bad. Maybe she left Partner to fight a dragon, but she came back. Griffon can look after Partner while Barkspawn rests. Be honorary Grey Warden. That will be good. Partner needs a lot of looking after.

Barkspawn closes his eyes.

…

…

…And wakes up to find he is on Partner’s bed. Partner is sleeping! All in clothes, though, like it is camping. But it is not camping? That is strange. Barkspawn licks Partner’s face, and sniffs to make sure everything is right. Partner wakes up and laughs and cries, and tells Barkspawn he is a good boy.

Yes!

He is!

Griffon is gone, though. Barkspawn looks, and worries, because Griffon was hurt. Barkspawn was hurt, too, but not so badly, he doesn’t think. He jumps off the bed and goes through the door, and finds Griffon in her place. She has bandages on her, but she is alive.

Good, he decides.

He sits down in front of her, and Griffon looks at him, and he looks at Griffon.

Griffon nods.

Barkspawn barks.

They have reached an accord.


	13. Sick Fic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The much-requested Looking Glass sick fic! Should not be considered canonical to the main timeline. <3

She wakes a few days before they’re set to leave for Arlathan, and Andruil’s holdings, with her head heavy and her throat sore.

Oh no.

It’s a force of effort to heave herself up out of bed. One which sets the room to spinning nauseatingly. Her movements are sluggish. Not quite  _inept_ , but clumsier than she’d like. Trying to get into her clothing is a monumental task, and she has to take it one piece at a time; pausing in between pulling on her leggings and then her tunic, and between buckling each segment of armour.

She’s sorely tempted to just stay in her room today. But she can’t afford to be that unobservant, and she has no idea what Mythal will do if she scents weakness in the water right now.

She’ll just have to bluff her way through the day. Hopefully, it’ll pass swiftly enough, and no one will even notice. Maybe she can attribute any slip-ups to fatigue. Like that time Cassandra was running a high fever and somehow managed to convince them all it was just allergies, until she all but collapsed.

The memory drags her down, and she must really be sick, because it strikes her uncommonly hard this morning.

It takes her a while longer to fight back a wash of tears. She swallows thickly a few times, but her eyes are dry when she at last manages to get out of the door.

No practice, not today. She’ll probably have to tell Pride what’s going on.

He isn’t at breakfast, though, which is worrying. Or in any of the likely chambers. She checks the library, just for good measure, and then heads out to the practice field. The clang of metal and the burn of spellwork in the air makes her dizzy, and it doesn’t even yield any useful results.

Damn.

By midday her worries have escalated, twisting knots in her stomach and burning through her skin. Though that might also be the fever. She enlists Curiosity’s help in her search, and even Sorrow’s, but it’s not until she’s giving serious consideration to just hunting down Mythal and asking  _her_  that Pride finally makes a reappearance. At lunch, looking slightly frazzled.

“My apologies,” he says to her. “Mythal sent me to tend to some matters in… are you alright?”

His brow furrows as she carefully takes the seat across from him. She has take a couple of seconds to reply. The room’s tilting a little more than she’d like, and her head is full of fog.

“Fine,” she says. Which, isn’t really what she should be telling him, but it’s an old habit for that word to come flying out of her mouth.

Pride narrows his eyes at her.

He leans forward, taking in her features more closely than he has for a while now. Not since he started getting better at reading her expressions.

“What has happened? What do you feel?” he abruptly demands. “You are flushed, sweating, and your reflexes have slowed. You may have been poisoned.”

He stands up, a flurry of movement that she makes the mistake of trying to follow.

She blinks, but only finds her voice again when he starts trying to cast some kind of spell on her.

“It is alright, it is only a cold,” she says.

“Cold? What else do you feel?” he asks. She has to reach up to stall his casting; catching his wrist. It’s surprisingly cool beneath her fingers.

“I mean, it is only an illness. A bug,” she tries to explain.

His frown deepens.

“You are not making sense,” he tells her, almost gently, as if she has just started murmuring gibberish. “Where was the bug? Did someone give it to you?”

Well. Presumably, someone or something.

“Did it bite you?” he tries.

“No. It is just… a thing which happens,” she says. “In the air, or in food sometimes, there are bugs and sometimes people just get sick. It passes. Usually. It is normal.”

Pride looks horrified.

“Is it part of aging?” he wonders.

She shrugs.

“It is part of life,” she tells him, simply.

He purses his lips at her.

“You may still have been poisoned,” he declares. “Permit me to check?”

With a sigh, she lets go of his wrist. He nods in thanks, and then casts his spell. And then a few more. It’s not unpleasant, at least. The soft glow tingles where it cascades down over her. He tries to discreetly follow his investigatory spells with a healing one, which she notices it; but it actually does help with the dizziness, some, so she doesn’t object, either.

“How do we heal you?” he wonders.

The thought of going back to the palace healers puts ice in her spine.

“Water. Rest. Time, and luck,” she tells him, with a shrug.

He doesn’t look like he cares very much for those answers.

“I will be fine. It does not even impede me much,” she insists, and to prove her point, stands up.

Without incident, even.

After a few more moments, Pride relents. He goes and fetches them a pitcher of water, which is kind of him. She retakes her seat, and picks at the available food. Drinks the water, when it comes, and does her best to keep up with the conversation. Her thoughts feel like mud, but she must be doing a passable job, because after a while, Pride relaxes a little.

He stays with her, though.

Rather than retreating to his duties, he follows her to the gardens, and then again to the library.

Where she mostly just sits and pretends she isn’t as ungodly dizzy and exhausted as she actually is.

“It is worsening,” Pride tells her.

“That happens,” she says, shooting for reassuring. If the look on his face is any indication, though, she falls pretty short.

Even she’s not expecting to fall over on their way out of the library, though.

She does alright getting down the staircase, and through the main entrance. But then she stumbles over the threshold of the doorway, completely loses her footing, and very nearly smacks face-first into the floor. The only reason she doesn’t is because Pride catches her.

In a dramatic move worthy of one of Varric’s romances, he swoops in, his arm tight around her waist. One of her hands closes reflexively around the front of his tunic, and she finds herself leaning into him, fumbling to regain the equilibrium that has suddenly fled her.

Oops.

When she finally manages to look up at him, his expression is horrified again.

“I am fine,” she assures him. “I just lost my balance.”

His eyebrows drop.

“No,” he says, very quietly.

Then – and to her brief consternation – he picks her up. The world tilts again as she’s jostled by the movement, and she grips at him in surprise for a moment. He’s very careful, though, as he adjusts her weight against him.

“Pride…”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him to put her back down. But he’s got that determined look on his face again, and really, it’s not an unpleasant enough situation that she wants to waste the energy arguing about it.

“I only need rest. I overdid it,” she assures him, instead.

The muscle in his jaw jumps, briefly. But then he nods, and starts walking. First in one direction, before he apparently changes his mind, and heads in another. They earn a few curious glances as they weave through the corridors. She’s a little surprised when someone even stops them. An elf she recognizes, vaguely, from their expedition. One of the healers.

“Did something happen?” the elf asks, giving her an assessing look.

Pride wavers a moment.

“She is suffering some difficulties, due to her nature,” he finally says. Which is more information than she’d care to give someone she hardly knows, but really, under the circumstances, she doesn’t suppose there are many lies that could more easily explain things.

The elf – what’s her name? Something with a ‘G’, she thinks – reaches over. The new diagnostic spell itches as it prods at her.

“Does Mythal know?”

Pride shakes his head.

“It only just began,” he says, which is  _definitely_ a lie.

The healer nods in acceptance.

“Let me know what course of action she decides to take. If you bring her to the healing chambers, I can tend her. Might be easier that way.”

To her surprise, the elf offers her the smallest of reassuring smiles, and then strides off.

…Huh.

“Do not tell Mythal,” she recommends.

“Perhaps not yet,” Pride concedes.

“I can walk,” she suggests. “Would be less conspicuous.”

Pride’s grip tightens on her.

But after a moment, he eases her back onto her feet.

Still, it’s a testament to how out-of-sorts she is that she doesn’t even figure out that they’re heading for his chambers until they almost arrive at them. The corridors are empty, at least. Not much activity. She thinks she spies something heading down the far end of one, but the figure’s back is towards them.

“Why are we here?” she wonders.

“Because you need rest,” Pride tells her.

“I could rest in my room.”

“If that particular place could be considered ‘restful’,” he replies. “But there are supplies in my chambers more readily at hand. It will be easier for me to help you here. Besides which, I will need to come and go from this room less, and that is actually safer.”

“I only tripped a little,” she tries telling him again.

It’s possible she’s grumbling.

“If it is as trivial as you suppose, then nothing will be harmed by acquiescing to my requests,” Pride points out. Then he softens, and she sees the worry in him. Written plain as day. “Please,” he adds.

How is she supposed to refuse that?

She sighs, and gives up.

Pride directs her – now with some smattering of colour on his cheeks – to follow him past the foyer of his rooms, and into the proper chambers. Soft light spills inside, but she doesn’t get much of a look at the place. It’s enough to just keep moving. There’s a couch, though. A white couch, draped in snowy furs, and she sinks into it when she sits down.

“What would help?” Pride asks her. “Water? Food?”

“Rest,” she decides. Some part of her thinks with ridiculous optimism that if she can just sit, just for a little while, it’ll all pass and she’ll be back to normal soon.

Her armour is uncomfortable, though. She looks at it, and then at Pride, and then back at it. Probably, she can’t do much fighting even  _if_  someone attacks right now. And she’s safe enough here, she supposes, where no one else should be. She swallows, and just sort of taps one of her arm braces.

“Do you mind if I take this off?” she asks him.

Pride stares at her, and then colours, just a little. But he rallies quickly.

“Of course not. Let me help,” he asks.

In all honesty, she probably needs a hand. So she just nods, and stares a little blearily as the colour spreads further across his cheeks.

His fingers are very deft, and very efficient where he helps her, though. Not the slightest hint of impropriety. They get her armour off, and it’s actually a remarkable improvement. She sinks against the furs, and lets out a breath. A small sigh, rasping a little out of her throat. Her eyes slide shut.

She doesn’t actually mean to just fall asleep then and there.

She knows that she has, though, because she wakes up again an indeterminate length of time later, when a hand brushes over her shoulder. She’s still pushes past the haze of unconsciousness when it shakes her, just gently.

Pride stares down at her. For half a second, though, it’s Solas staring down at her. Solas, dressed strangely, but there, really there. She reaches for him, like in a dream. He stills as her palm brushes across his cheek.

“My heart,” she murmurs.

His eyes go tremendously wide.

Then she drifts back down, away into dreams of fractured memories. Painted rotundas, and Leliana’s birds circling as Dorian throws books over the railings. Solas up on his scaffolding, painting quietly, while she reads and listens to the  _thump_  of chantry literature striking the floor.

After a while, she becomes aware of a white wolf sitting beside her.

She threads her fingers, almost carelessly, through his fur. Cards her touch down his spine. So soft and still so bright.

When she wakes again, the same wolf is curled onto the thick carpet in front of the couch. She’s wrapped in furs, she finds, and an unfamiliar, silvery blanket. A pitcher of water has been laid out on a little table next to her, along with a few cups. Vines trail across the coloured glass surface of it. The light spilling from the windows passes through its surface, and the tabletop looks like the bright, bold shapes of a fresco, as it’s covered with the reflected colours.

She sits up, sluggish with the aftermath of fever, and a lingering tingle in her skin that speaks of healing spells cast upon her. But she feels much more clear-headed and stable.

The wolf looks up; awake, too, it seems.

“…You do seem to have improved,” he notes.

There’s a strange quality to his voice. Relief, but also just the faintest note of hurt, and confusion.

She recalls, vaguely, the endearment she’d said to him, and swallows.

“Yes. I am sorry to have troubled you.”

He shakes his head.

“It was no trouble,” he gently assures her. Something ease in his eyes, just a little bit. Some flare of acceptance.

And compassion.

She fills herself a cup of water, to wash down the sandpaper in her throat, and very much doubts that she hasn’t brought him a lot of trouble, all things considered. In this, and in everything else.

But in the end, perhaps, there’s not much either one of them can say to make it any better.


	14. Glory and Desire

Glory is so radiant, it is impossible to look away.

Desire is not the only one to orbit it within the Dreaming. The spirit is great and powerful, as grand as all the accomplishments of the People, as mighty as a newborn empire, as benevolent as the warmest of virtues. It lives deep in the Dreaming. A whisper only in the Waking world, but oh, the spirits know it well. Glory drives and sustains, and so many desire it.

Desire cannot help but contemplate Glory, and all the ways in which it might be attained. It is large, and its influence spreads greatly. It is astounding, and yet, always fleeting; one moment it seems to occupy one dream, and the next, it takes on another. Desire worries that it is not a spirit that can last. That it must inevitably change or fade away. That disappointment will touch it; that shame will stymie it. That too much of the Waking world will fail it, and if Desire has one desire of its own, it is that this never happen.

It is a strange thing, to be denied a desire when that is the very essence of what you are.

None of them can find Glory for a time, but this is not uncommon. Things move as they ever do, and Desire does not fear. But when Glory is torn full from the Dreaming, they all feel it. As the sun would be to the Waking world, so is Glory to theirs. Its absence dims everything. The loss of its presence, the diminished light, ripples through all the fabric that weaves the world together. Many spirits lament.

Desire the one who discovers the truth of it. Of what was desired, and what was taken. That Glory has been given form, against its will; that it is in the Waking world, trapped in flesh and blood, and it will only be so long before Glory is thereby lost to them forever. For it cannot persist in the solidity of the other side. Desire knows - the Waking world is a place that denies. It hears all the wants that go unanswered, the wishes unfulfilled. The glories never achieved. For all its greatness, Glory is fragile. 

She goes after it.

In Falon’Din’s lands, she finds her treasured friend. The body it is in is a gift from Ghilan’nan, a payment over some trespass or another. Appeasement. It is crafted to be beautiful, and oh, it is. Desire knows the beauty of bodies. It knows when one has been made exceptional, if only because it can feel the want of others, pouring in towards it. Still, the beauty is nothing compared to what it was in the Dreaming. In the Waking, Glory’s light is trapped. It is confined to flawless skin, and sky blue eyes, and hair that falls in flaxen waves. It does not spread, even though it still seems to shine.

Falon’Din is quite taken with his gift, and as is his custom, uses it. Desire flits through the leader’s dark halls, neither welcome nor unwelcome, and shivers. This place is filled with longings denied, with wants that should not be wants at all - want for comfort, for safety, for the sharp edge of fear to abate. It twists, and desires become like knives. Weapons with which to lash out at others.

Glory is disoriented. Trapped in a body unwanted, dragged to meetings like a favoured pet, taken to battlefields as a banner of Falon’Din’s glory, and bedchambers as a preferred toy. As desires twist only one way, and Desire fights to change their course, as much as it can. To try and stop…

But it is not enough.

It is an old spirit, but small. Considerate. It is meant to help guide people to what they need, to show them what they want, even if they cannot see it themselves. Yet the desires in Falon’Din’s company repulse her. And from Glory, there is confusion. There is the wrenching pain of a nature being forcibly changed, and denied, and made mockery of, and stained. 

Desire feels Glory’s desire for an end, and knows it will come soon, one way or another.

_No._

Even if Glory cannot remain itself, cannot return to the Dreaming, Desire _yearns_  to be with it still. Whatever the form it takes, whatever the changes must be made, it cannot be lost. Desire visits Glory often in the gilded cage that Falon’Din has made for it, and speaks gently to it. Whispers promises and assurances. Brushes fingers over soft skin, and wipes away tears, and listens to anguished shouts and denials and desperate pleas. Glory wants. Something, anything, a tether, a hand, a hope.

And Desire wants, more than anything, to be that.

It knows then what it must do.

“Wait,” Desire says. “I will come for you. I will save you. But you must wait for me.”

Glory promises to wait. Swears it. Yes. Hope will not be lost. Desire will find a way.

But it is more difficult than imagined. Glory’s plight and its own wants and the pain of Falon’Din’s halls has twisted it. Falon’Din himself denies any such weakling spirit a change at embodiment, so Desire goes elsewhere. To Ghilan’nain, who turns away its twisting nature. To Mythal, who does the same. To Dirthamen, who nearly breaks it into fuel; and at last to Elgar’nan, upon whose altar it collapses, and of whom it begs vengeance.

Elgar’nan hears its plea, and unlike the others, does not recoil from the twisted edges that have begun to redefine Desire’s nature.

“You come to me, and you are right to,” the leader tells her. “Glory was misused, and now it has been lost. It is owed the vengeance you ask for. So I will grant your request. In battle you will be trained; and if you can win Glory back from Falon’Din, bring you both to me, and I will keep you both here in a more fitting manner.”

Desire can tell that Elgar’nan, too, wishes for Glory, but it is a different kind of wish from Falon’Din’s. A simpler kind of grandiosity, that does not slide down Desire like oil, or leave blackness to tarnish the edges of its being. It is better, _far_  better, and so it will have to do.

“You have my fealty,” Desire promises.

In so promising, then, to the Waking world is it born. To a body that it changes more to suit itself. To the faces of Elgar’nan’s followers, who regard it with some wariness, at first; but also with respect, and then growing friendships. Desire forgets how to feel what people want, but learns that there are other ways to tell. Elgar’nan’s followers have guile aplenty, but everyone, Desire knows, _everyone_ , wants something.

She wants something, too. And she has left it waiting for too long already. So she must learn, and quickly, so that she might go and win the one she loves most away from the gilded cages and battlefields and bedrooms. She takes up the biggest weapon she can find. Teaches her arms to hold it and her hands to move it, even as she remasters the subtleties of magic in this form. Still, she is not powerful.

But she is resolute.

It is meant to be years before newly embodied go to battle. Desire leaves with Elgar’nan’s forces just two months into ownership of her new form. Every day, she thinks of cutting her way through Nameless and Falon’Din’s people alike, to where Glory is chained, and breaking those bonds, and whisking them both away. Every night she falls asleep with that need unmet, she feels a pang in her chest.

Elgar’nan is as good as his word, though; he sends her battalion to support Falon’Din’s in a skirmish at the forefront of the fighting.

She remembers.

Memory is like the Dreaming, for it is connected to it. Over time, it will put emphasis on the parts that matter most to the one who is remembering. When she sleeps, she will relive it, sometimes. The sight of Falon’Din’s forces. Of Glory, in battle. So close, just right there - as if Desire could reach out and…

But that is not how it truly happens. It is all further away. Much further than anyone could reach. She only sees the flash of hair, the glint of the bright armour that Glory is clad in, the bow taking aim from behind the enemy lines, and knows her physical form cannot move fast enough to get there in time. An arrow whistles through the air. Aimed at the banner of Falon’Din’s army. Aimed to cut down the gleaming signal flare of it, and so it does; and the air shatters where it strikes Glory. Streams of white light burst into the sky, whirling like clouds. An empty husk of a body drops to the ground.

Desire drops, too.

She turns her gaze upwards, as Glory’s light fades into the sun. Shattered, like a spirit. Not slain like an elf. For the arrow had struck, but it should not have been a fatal blow. But it was, just the same, because Glory had given up. Had survived all this time, had waited so long, but with that one final strike…

It had been too much.

Desire had taken too long to come.

It seems to her that in the aftermath of it, the Waking world dims, too; just as the Dreaming had done when Glory had been stolen from it. Desire knows she should stand. That she should fight. But she cannot. Her legs will not lift her, and her heart is broken. Let her die, then, too, she thinks. Let her shatter, too, and let all the pieces of her go to Glory, if they might help. Might ever help restore it.

She waits for the tide of battle to take her. For some enemy strike to end it.

But none does.


	15. Dirthamen

Dirthamen’s first love is a spirit, born twined around his own.

In the beauty of the Dreaming, they come into being surrounded by the bright glow of Glory. Glory who takes their hands and names them Purpose and Longing, and holds them close to its brightness… and then is gone.

Longing understands. Glory goes, and it wants the bright spirit to stay; and in that moment, it perceives what lies at the heart of its own nature. In the wake of this, it is left silent and reverent, contemplative; and if it had been born alone, it thinks, then perhaps it would never have moved from that singular dream. It would have spent forever basking in the surety of wanting, but not having; in the possibilities that then stretched on ceaselessly before it, born of all the speculative dreams that suddenly filled its own mind.

But Longing was born next to Purpose, and at that same instant, when Glory left, Purpose caught up its twin-soul and sped after it. Longing looked, then, to the brilliance of its own sibling, and learned something new; that there could be a longing for more than one thing. That there were many, in fact; that even as Purpose chased after Glory, Longing wished for its gaze to turn away, and back towards itself. It wished to offer something that could fulfil Purpose.

Love is the chained linked between them. It is instantaneous. When Longing becomes Dirthamen, and Purpose becomes Falon’Din, it remains. It weaves in threads of nostalgia that make Dirthamen wish to go back to the simplicity of that first moment in the Dreaming. It is woven with worries and doubts, and dread, as it grows ever more frayed and distant; the one connection he has always had. The one he will always hold, even should his twin forsake him.

That is the first love Dirthamen knows.

The second is different. It does not settle into the firmament of his being, not in the same way. It comes with patience and affection, and a voice that bids him call her ‘mother’. Mythal whispers to Dirthamen of wings and freedom, of a world of endless possibility. He is born from her dreams, and so, he thinks, he shares them. That is a secret that settles between them. Sometimes he does not know if the love he has for her is truly for her, or if it is for the existence of that hidden truth.

Dirthamen loves his dreams. But Mythal turns dreams to substance; as she bid himself and Falon’Din to become substance. Sometimes he thinks that is a mistake. The cage of reality seals visions, and closes the pathways which they might take. It bears consequences that ideas do not. 

There are days when Dirthamen longs to become something else. Not even anything in particular. Just… something other than himself. He walks two steps back towards the Dreaming. It makes his body burn, when he goes too far, but it feels remarkable, too. There are songs written on the depths. There are slumbering giants, and dreams that make the very fabric of the world. There is truth, hidden, but, always just beyond his reach. He goes too far.

He splinters.

Dirthamen’s third love is born from the pieces of himself.

Spirit of Fear and Deceit consume the shards. He feels them. There is such a beauty in them; in secrets, and caution, in wariness, and lies. Lies can reshape the truth, when told fervently enough. Secrets can change the outline of dreams. They are the anchor of deception. Dirthamen remembers flying with Purpose through the Dreaming, chasing the edges of Glory; he binds himself to the wings that his own nature has grown, and together they are more. A consequence that opens many more pathways than it seals.

Dirthamen has six eyes, and four wings, and a face that changes on the whims of memory and illusion. He can put more or less of himself into the bound pieces of his heart. He can make himself small as the least of the People, or nearly as grand as the sun.

There is something, he learns. Something in the smallness of things. To wear a simple skin, and live a simple life, makes the dreams of the world so much bigger. It arrests him, this revelation. He pours half of his very being into Fear, and grants Deceit his shape, and shrinks down and down until he is as small as a Waking-born child. Indeed, that is the form he takes. Even his memories, he hands also to Deceit; and all the rest of his great power he places in his orb, there to rest until all that remains is a small, lost child, with only four years of learning in his head and no knowledge of his identity; wandering the streets of Arlathan.

His fourth love is a lot like his second; and yet nothing like it, at all. 

Esenastenasalin finds him in the lower reaches of Arlathan, staring at the paint on her walls, and pondering the nature of his own existence. She is warm and kind and worried. She takes his hands and asks who he belongs to. Where are his parents? He does not know. She presses her hand to his brow, and brings him to a place full of light and colour, hidden behind simple grey walls.

A magic, secret place.

He likes that.

There are more elves there, who worry and fuss. Ess gives him food to eat, and pats his head. She asks him more questions he cannot answer, and then speaks in hushed tones with other elves. From his little body, with his little mind and tiny thoughts, the room around him looks grand and wondrous. His eyes scan the shifting paints of the walls. He peers closely at the wood grain of the furnishings around him, and stares at the gleaming surfaces of the beautiful bottles arrayed behind him, until sturdy arms lift him up and carry him up several flights of stairs, to a soft room painted with clouds and dancing spirits.

Ess smiles at him.

“Everything is going to be alright,” she promises.

It gives him a nice feeling. Warm. Soft, like the pillows she sets around him. She gives him a book, too, filled with big letters that a gentle voice reads out to him. When Ess leaves, he feels a pang; even though she leaves him with a friendly spirit, who sits at his back and answers his questions about the book, and is warm and nice and kind.

_Pleasant,_ he thinks. It is pleasant, in a way he has never experienced before. It is simple, and some part of him makes tentative connections to a radiant sort of light, and a notion that he is missing someone else. There should be another, he thinks. Like him.

The spirit agrees, though it cannot tell him where this other might be, or who they are, or how he has lost them.

Eventually Ess comes back. She tells him they are going to go and talk to some people tomorrow, but again, that everything will be alright. She arranges the blankets around him, and sits warm at his side until he drifts into dreams. There curious spirits flit and flutter about him. They show him things. They offer as many answers as they do questions; the spirits of Arlathan guide him through safe, strange dreams of streams and pebbles and sun-baked gardens, and hold his tiny hands, and treat him to glimpses of a world that feels wondrously vast.

When he wakes there is warm sunlight on his face. Ess takes him into the city. He feels its vastness keenly; he looks up and up, and never runs out of things to see. He stops to stare, and Ess lets him peer at the stones of the roads, and the make of the walls, and drifting flower petals, and passing banners and spirits. They go up and up, away from the bright things hidden behind secret walls, and up to where there are secrets hidden behind bright things instead. When his legs get tired Ess carries him. She runs her fingers through his hair and bids him rest against her shoulder.

Eventually they come to a place of brilliant crystals and vast, floating spires. New elves come and take him from Ess, who wants to keep him. He can feel the want of it in her, even as she gently hands him away. It is a strange lurch. He looks at her and… this is new. He is small and the world is big, but Ess likes him just because she does, and she hands him away even though she does not want to.

The feeling twists through him, and he bursts into tears.

Somehow this gets him placed back into Ess’ arms. She ducks her head and holds him close as they pass through vast, gleaming halls; as if she is trying to make herself seem smaller, even as she curls around him, because he is smaller, still. Eventually they are led to a warm room full of flowers and pretty, shining thing. One of the other elves coos at him and gives him a soft thing to hold, that looks like an even smaller elf. He holds it as Ess holds him, and he learns then the reassurance of having something in his arms, even as someone else has him in theirs.

After a while another elf comes into the room. She is radiantly beautiful. Ess seems to shrink away from her, as if she is hard to look at; like the sun. But she doesn’t hurt his own eyes. Although he finds himself reaching for the beautiful shapes that dangle from her hair.

Sylaise.

She takes him by the chin, and tilts his face upwards, and smiles when he looks at her. In a soft voice she asks him all the questions that everyone else has so far. When she finishes, she pets his hair, just like Ess does. She opens her arms, and picks him up. He feels the same lurch, but something in the air is… different. He is curious about this woman. In his memories he does not know her, but some part of him recognizes her just the same, even though there is no answering recognition in her.

He does not cry, this time.

Not until much later, when Sylaise gives him to another strange elf, and he realizes he cannot see Ess anywhere in the sea of faces now gathered around him. Then he is offered toys and food and hugs, and more warm arms and kind faces. He gains many new loves in such a short amount of time, then. There are his new _mamaes_ , who love him like Ess did, and then even more, over time. There are the spirits; Joy and Glamour and Wisdom, and many more besides. He gets less small, and he learns that anything that is small can grow, and anything that is great can be cut down.

When his body is eight, he learns to evade his caretakers. He slips through the city, looking for more places. Small things and shadows, and secrets. He sneaks back into the bright world hidden behind grey walls. Esenastenasalin finds him again, one night. She scolds him for running off, and takes him back to his parents. But there is something there, still; something that comes back when he sneaks off, again and again, and finds her tavern, and is given food and treated to stories and often scolded, but always with a sense that it is not because he is unwelcome.

He finds he loves the city, too. In all its beauty and secrets. In all its twists and turns.

When he is fourteen, his explorations venture beyond the city walls. He goes beyond the gleam of the nearest eluvian, and gets lost almost immediately. There are bright lights in the distance that he follows until he finds himself drawn into a tangled maze; a defensive measure him himself once built, though he does not remember it. The varterrals loom, huge and menacing, and he flees from them in heart-pounding terror until one finally catches him. It only picks him up, though, and moves him away from the more dangerous parts of the maze.

He is lost for two days, in the end. The varterrals bring him food and open pathways for him. At length, he makes his way to the outer ring of the maze, and then is found by a searching party. Apparently, his absence has not gone unnoticed. This party is a mixed group of Falon’Din and Dirthamen’s people, who seem surprised and relieved to find him alive. They ask him many questions about the maze, and how he navigated it.

The party member elected to speak to him is one of Falon’Din’s servants. A beautiful one. He stares at their features, at the curtain of dark hair and the silvery lines of their markings; and he thinks this was a poor choice, because he finds he has trouble speaking in their presence. _Sumeilmi._  Even with the round scolding he endures from his parents, and then from everyone else, and even considering the maze and its wonders, some part of his mind lingers on the beautiful elf. 

More and more often, whenever Falon’Din’s people venture into the city, he finds excuses to be in the same place as them. He watches Sumeilmi with an awareness for details that he has not felt since he was much smaller. He learns a new kind of love, then. A kind of bubbly, giddy, infatuated feeling, that seems to chase away his thoughts at times, and spreads in tendrils of fascination. Sumeilmi’s hair goes down to their knees, and looks like a night sky full of stars. Sumeilmi’s laughter is a sharp bark, that cuts through the air distinctly. Sumeilmi’s armour is etched with twisting faces. Sumeilmi carries a staff that looks like moonlight, and their skin is dark except where it isn’t, in vivid clouds of palor that spread like spilled paint across their cheeks and forearms.

He feels like he could fill a book with all the things he notices about Sumeilmi.

When he is twenty-five, Sylaise puts her vallaslin onto his face herself. He is proud. The world is vast, and he is still small, but he feels ready to go and become a bigger part of it. His mothers hug him close, and congratulations are plentiful. He goes to Ess’ tavern, and she runs her fingers through his hair, as if he does not seem much bigger at all in her eyes.

That same day he goes to find Sumeilmi. His words still seem to fail him. So he writes the beautiful elf a letter, and takes it all the way to Falon’Din’s holdings outside of the city. He only means to leave it with one of the holdings’ messengers. It is not even a love letter, not truly; it is only all the admirable things he has noticed, accumulated in a message filled with a longing that is under no obligation to be fulfilled. He would not have even done this much, but his mothers have told him that it was important to actually try and _achieve_  things he wanted sometimes.

By chance, the lord himself is arriving that day, though.

He is following the road from the eluvian when it gleams and bursts open, and then he is nearly overrun by Falon’Din’s party; riding high upon strange, dark harts. He leaps from the road to avoid the flurry of pounding hoof beats. In an instant he stares up, and catches the eye of an ominous figure sitting at the head of the charge.

Falon’Din raises his hand, and halts the procession.

In one smooth motion, the lord slides from his sadly, and stalks over to where he has fallen by the roadside. There is sharpness and menace to his steps. A spike of fear rushes through him as the lord grasps his collar, and drags him to his feet. Cold eyes lock with his own. His heart pounds, and something inside of _pulls._

It robs him of thought.

In Falon’Din’s eyes, there is recognition.

“ _You,”_ he hisses, glowering at him. His glare takes in the fresh markings of his vallaslin, and his expression twists further. “This is where you have been? Serving _Sylaise?”_

There is so much anger. Wrath. He does not know how to answer the question, but he knows that something vital hinges upon it.

“F-forgive me, my lord,” he tries.

Falon’Din’s face only twists in further displeasure.

“How dare you?” he demands.

He is shaking. 

“I do not understand, my lord, I am sorry,” he says.

Those sharp eyes turn him over again. Something painful knifes through his skull. Seizes him behind his ribs, and feels like it is wrenching at him, horribly. When the moment passes, Falon’Din’s grip has moved to his throat. There is something marginally calmer in his expression, though now he seems disgusted more than anything.

“You really do not understand. You have lost yourself to whatever game you were playing with this; how embarrassing,” the leader says.

“My lord, please…”

He drops to his knees. For a moment, Falon’Din smirks. Looks pleased, even, past his inexplicable rage, and he hopes…

“I suppose I had better fix this,” the lord says.

Then he raises his hand. The air bursts, and something dharp and fierce pierces through his chest. It burns. He gasps, twisted backwards, as his heart bursts and blood floods up his mouth and everything _burns_  in agony.

He does not want to die.

He slumps, gurgling and pained. Slips, and falls, down and down, into the spiral of dreams. He learns that dying is less like falling violently asleep, under certain circumstances, than it is like being cruelly awoken.

In the Dreaming he bursts back into awareness to a flurry of wings and the cries of birds. He _screams._ He is no longer small, and power floods back into him. Awareness does. It drowns out all the little pieces he had gathered, and burns away so much with the flood of it. He does not know what to do. He drifts in unawareness for several long moments, confused and self-defeating, clutching his chest as he feels to small to fill out the body he has regained. His foci furls and unfurls, pulsing power. Fear and Deceit lay themselves upon him, wings rustling, trapped in a living blanket of feathers.

At length, he stands.

Falon’Din comes and finds him not long after that. Tearing through his palace, ranting about insults, apparently incensed that Dirthamen thought he would not notice the difference between himself and Deceit, and further furious that if his twin-soul was going to serve someone, it should be _Sylaise._  He expects Dirthamen’s gratitude for ‘curing’ his confusion, and demands compensation - Sylaise is inordinately displeased over the death of her servant.

Dirthamen listens to his brother’s shouting, and at length, simply nods.

“What were you even trying to accomplish in that miserable form?” his brother demands.

“I wanted to see,” Dirthamen says.

“I cannot imagine you would see much of interest from the dirt,” Falon’Din replies.

It… that… it was not supposed to go that way, he thinks. Especially not at the end. He has lost more pieces of himself, he suspects. Wanting them back is an interesting exercise in futility. He is fairly certain he has lost memories, too. Much of his experience seems to linger only in vague impressions. A few faces. Some names.

“I saw a great deal,” he says. It would be nice, he thinks, if he could have recalled it well.

Falon’Din sighs, long-suffering.

“Do not do that again,” his twin-soul commands.

No, he thinks. It is not in him to do that again, most probably.

He doubts he could withstand the loss a second time.


	16. Esenastenasalin

‘Esenastenasalin’ is the name her parents give her, when she is born.

She is born in the midst of a war, with that mouthful of a name; with three loving parents, and no concept of the dangers of the world. No understanding of why her family always needs to pack up and leave, never staying in one place for too long, always finding a new village. A new camp. Her parents argue about going north or south. They think she doesn’t hear. Doesn’t hear them talk about food supplies, and ships, and tiny, growing bodies that need to eat every day. _Defecting_ , her parents call it; with their three faces writ with three different patterns, and their hushed, fervent voices.

She knows they have to keep moving. That if someone finds them, they’ll be in trouble. 

She does not know, at first, that it is her fault.

How could she? Her parents love her beyond reason. They shower her in affection, and tell her she is precious, and of all the things she sometimes overhear them arguing about, her existence is not one of them. She does not know that children need permission to be born. That three loving parents are not, alone, allowed to make the decision to create life. That in war times nearly _no_  Waking children are born, because combat needs fighters, and tiny bodies that are growing and fragile minds that are forming cannot provide those.

She does not know that her parents are considered traitors just because the had her.

But she learns.

When she is ten years old she wakes in the night to the sounds of shouting. It is dark, and the air smells strange. She does not know what to do, so she hides under her bed, fearful of monsters and mean things; of creatures that stalk the shadows of her mind. Her childish attempts to comprehend just what her parents might be running from, given shape and form by the spirits who flit through her dreams.

When her bedroom door opens, though, it is not a shadowy monster that walks through. It is an elf.

Granted, an elf Esenastenasalin does not know, but she has never met an elf who was dangerous before. Still, she hesitates a moment, unsure of this stranger in her house. Unfamiliar boots walk up to the edge of the bed, and then a figure bends down. The strange elf smiles kindly at her.

“Little one,” he says. “It is alright. No one will hurt you. Can you come out?”

He extends a hand towards her.

After a moment more, she accepts it. The elf pulls her from her hiding place, and asks for her name. He takes her hand, and leads her downstairs. There are more unfamiliar elves there. Her parents are there, too. They look tense and unhappy, and there is fear in the atmosphere. But it calms when they see her, just like usual. They each hug her, and tell her to be good.

She does not understand. Be good for what?

“It will be alright,” her mother tells her. “We have to go away for a little while, my love, but we will not be far. These nice people are going to take you to a really beautiful place. They will look after you there.”

Her heart lurches. She cannot comprehend it. Her parents would never send her away. Not yet, at least. She needs them with her until she is grown enough to look after herself, and that will not be for a long time yet.

“I want to stay with you,” she says.

“We will not be far,” her sire repeats to her, and then her papa hugs her tight. Her papa has always been the worst at hiding his feelings. As he holds her, she feels the sharp bite of his sorrow, and it makes her eyes itch. She tries not to cry very much. Nothing distresses her parents quite so badly as her tears, and she prefers them to be happy; to smile and laugh so she can see them do the same.

But this is so strange. And frightening. She bursts into tears, and she knows it is a terrible mistake when she does, because one of the unfamiliar elves takes her away from papa, then. They sweep her out of the room, away from her parents. She hears Papa call for her, once, a cry that breaks off the beginning of her name just as soon as she is out of his sight.

“Es-”

The door closes, and there is a sharp crack, and Papa does not finish his call.

“Papa?!” she calls back, alarmed.

“Shhh,” says the elf holding her. “It is alright, little one. Your parents must be quiet, for now. They have to go away. I know it is sad, but you will be fine. There are people in the city who are very eager to meet you.”

She does not want to meet them. She wants her parents. No matter how gently the strangers talk, they are not her mother and sire and papa. But no matter how hard she cries, they do not take her back to them. They carry her away from the house, instead. Away from the town, and the people who watch from windows, down the road to the big eluvian, and through many more roads.

They take her to the city, which gleams and shines so bright, and is so big and so full that she is stunned into utter silence by it.

“Is this not exciting, little one? You are going to live here, in the household of Gracious Sylaise,” the elf carrying her says, as she gapes.

The words make her shrink against his shoulder.

She does not want to live here. It is too big. It is too… too shiny _._ The spires that stretch towards the sky are bright and gleaming, and a little mean-looking, too, she thinks. It feels like anything she touched would get fingerprint smudges on it; like if she ran over these roads she might leave behind muddy footsteps that ruined them. None of the place she sees feel like she should be allowed in them.

Nothing in the city is for somebody like her. It is for big, fancy people; the sorts her parents always avoided.

 _I want to go home,_  she thinks.

Not even back to the house in the village, not really. They had only been there for a few months anyway. She could go to another village, maybe. To another little house, with her parents, and wide open skies, and tiny buildings that sat upon the ground, or maybe drifted up towards the clouds. But not like this.

People stare at them as they go past. A spirit drifts up, and she buries her face in the shoulder of the elf who is holding her, and squeezes her eyes shut. 

They make it a long ways before the elf who has her has her walk, instead. He still holds her hand, though, and he lets her hide her face against his leg whenever too many people look at her. She is used to being looked at, but she has never been near so many people in her whole life. Not even half as many. She thinks every village and town she has ever lived in could fit in the city, with room leftover to spare.

The place she is taken to is very big, and so splendid that she is scared to look at it. Everything shines. Everything is perfect. The people around her all talk about Lady Sylaise, but the lady herself is At War, which is a concept she is familiar with, even if no one will tell her the particulars of what is involved.

When they get to a pair of gleaming gates, the man who brought her leaves her with another stranger. Her life becomes a sea of strangers, then; elves who give her a room, and give her toys, and books, and ask her questions. Simple things. What is her name? How old is she? Can she read? Write? Does she know numbers? What is her favourite animal? They feed her and are kind to her, but when she asks for her parents, they only say that they are away and cannot come for her now.

Evening finds her in tears again. Resolutely refusing to do anything until she can have her parents back. A very beautiful woman with a narrow face, and a kind smile that does not touch her eyes, comes to see her then. She sits next to her, and holds her hand, and in a gentle voice she explains that her parents have been ‘lost’.

Something horrible sinks through her.

“Can we go find them?” she wonders.

But she knows. She does not know how she knows, except that she thinks she might have known ever since she heard her papa’s voice get cut off so suddenly. Ever since strangers carried her away, and none of the people she loved most came racing after her.

“No, child. They are gone for good. But we are happy to have you with us,” the woman she does not know says.

This becomes the mantra of her new life. _We are happy to have you with us,_  strangers say. And they are, it seems. They give her things, and fuss over her. They show her things, beautiful things, and tsk over her hair and nails and skin, and her magic and her learning. Some want her to call them by names she will not give them; mother and father, and other titles that do not belong to them.

After two years of this, one of her caretakers tuts at her, and sighs.

“Such a stoney heart to have beating in such a tiny chest,” he says. “You are common born through and through, aren’t you, Esenastenasalin?”

She wrinkles her nose. She hates how people say her name in the city. As if it is a chore; as if the mouthful is too much trouble for them to manage. It is not _her_ fault they go to such trouble over her, in any respect. She certainly never asked them to. She never wanted them to come and take her away, to this gleaming place where nothing is right, where her only recourse is to stick out like a sore thumb. She tells them to just call her _Ess,_  but they refuse. As if they want her to always know how much fuss they are going to.

When she is twelve, she runs away. She means to get out of the city. To go back to the village, and see if she can find any trace of her parents. Instead she gets lost, wandering down and around through winding streets until she is in a place she does not recognize at all. The moon is high, and the air is turning just a little cold. Snow does not fall here like it does in the villages. It drifts in pretty flakes, that melt as soon as they touch the ground, or brush against her skin. But it is still enough to make her shiver. Eventually she stops, in a small alcove away from the bright lights above, and sits. She mostly means to take a break. But before long she is crying. Great, gulping sobs, and hiccups that shake her shoulders.

When she hears the footsteps, she looks up, and then freezes. She has been discovered.

The elf who stands behind her is not like most of the ones she has seen in the city, though. His clothes are leather, and worn. There is a hood on his head, though as soon as she looks at him, he pushes it down. His hair is braided, but all strangely. She blinks at it for a moment.

Slowly, he kneels down, until he is at her eye level.

“Hello,” he says.

She swallows, and resists the urge to take a swipe at her eyes. It is dark. Maybe he will not realize she has been crying if she does not give it away.

“Hello,” she mumbles back at him, internally bracing herself for the usual rush of questions. What is your name, who do you belong to, what are you doing here all by yourself…

“It is a very fine evening for a walk,” the man says.

She blinks.

“Snow is a rare treat. It is very tempting to take the time to enjoy it,” he continues.

“…Yeah,” she agrees. Her cheeks itch. She gives up, and brushes her arm across them. The man only smiles at her, gently. After a moment he extends a hand towards her.

“My name is Haninan,” he says.

Swallowing down past her thick throat, she reaches over, and puts her hand in his.

“’m Ess,” she tells him.

It seems easier than trying to get through her whole name. 

Haninan beams.

“That cannot be the whole of it,” he says. “Do you parcel out your name by pieces, so that strangers must dedicate themselves to discovering a new part each time they cross your path?”

Ess stares at him, baffled, and then shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Esenastenasalin is my whole name, but it is a lot to bother with.”

“And do you not think you are worth the bother?” Haninan wonders.

She shrugs.

“I like Ess,” she tells him.

She barely realizes she is being coaxed into standing until she is suddenly on her feet. Haninan is big and tall, but he reminds her of the villagers and wanderers she is most accustomed to. He looks as out of place in the city as she feels. There is something nice about that seeing that. About wondering if there is anyone else, here, who is just as out-of-place.

“Well. A person should always have some say in what they are called,” Haninan tells her. “Perhaps you might do me a favour, Ess? I was considering going for a walk, but I hate to go alone. Would you walk with me?”

She considers this matter very carefully. 

“Alright,” she decides, with a nod. Haninan, she thinks, looks like the sort of person who might lose track of himself. 

He smiles at her, and squeezes her hand.

He does not ask her many questions, though, even when they begin to make their way through the streets again. It is nice. Ess finds herself talking a bit of her own volition, after a while. Not to answer queries or satisfy someone else’s interest, but just to share little things she has noticed, or to ask questions of her own. Haninan always smiles when he looks at her, and seems to know the answer to every question she has.

When her legs start to get tired, he asks if he can carry her on his back.

“I used to carry my son that way. Sometimes I get nostalgic for it,” he tells her.

She figures he has noticed that she is getting tired, and is being nice about it. But since he _is_  being nice about it, she climbs up onto his back. He smells like tree sap and leather, up close, and he does not mind when she looks carefully at his braids.

“You have a son?” she asks him.

“Hmm. Yes. He is a very silly sort, I am afraid. But I love him quite a lot anyway,” Haninan tells her.

“Is he all grown up?” she wonders. Probably. Sometimes she thinks there might not be any other children in the whole world. Certainly, she has not seen any others in the city.

“So they tell me,” Haninan replies.

Ess snickers, a bit.

“You do not think so?” she asks.

“Parents never really think of their children as grown,” he tells her.

She does not know why. It is a simple sort of sentiment, and one she has heard before. But something in her wrenches terribly at the words. She goes quiet, near-shocked by the pain. But after a while she finds there are tears falling from her eyes again. A burning blur that grows and grows, until she is trying to muffle the sound in Haninan’s hood, and she is sure she is crinkling his cloak up with how firmly her fingers are twisted in it.

At length, Haninan stops. He coaxes her off of his back, and scoops her into a hug. His cloak falls all around them, and blocks out the cold brightness of the city as she burrows her face against him, and shakes, and cries, and cries until her throat hurts and her head is swimming with it, and her arms will not stop trembling.

“They are dead,” she says. “Mother and Sire and Papa. They are all dead. I think it might be my fault.”

“Oh, little heart. It is not your fault,” Haninan tells her.

“I hear everyone talking, when they think I am not listening. They say I was not supposed to happen,” she explains, in a way she knows must sound unclear; but her new friend seems to understand her anyway. His arms tighten around her, and he shushes her, kindly, rubbing a hand down her back.

“Did you make yourself happen?” Haninan asks.

The question is so absurd that it startles a laugh from her, through the tears.

“No,” she manages.

“Then it does not matter who thinks you should or should not have happened. What matters is that your parents wanted you, and loved you. I can tell. There is so much love all around you that you must have been loved a great deal to gather it. And you must miss it, too. But however your parents died, they gave you enough pieces of themselves that you carry them with you, in all that love you can remember. Can you not still feel it? It is quieter, now, but it is there. Your heart seems fit to burst with the fullness of it.”

She swallows, and remembers scolding words. _Such a stoney heart._ There is no way for a stranger to know anything about her heart, either way; but if someone has to make a guess, this seems a much kinder sort.

 _“_ I like you,” she tells Haninan.

He lets out a surprised laugh of his own. When he pulls back a little, he pats her shoulder.

“I like you, too, little one,” he says, and she thinks he means it. Not just because she is little, either.

He stays with her a while, then, until her eyes have dried and her arms have stopped shaking. Haninan gives her a soft cloth to wipe her tears with, and has her sit and take deep, long breaths. When she looks up she realizes that they have gotten back to the fancier parts of the city; to Sylaise’s big, big house, and the people who look after her. She wonders if it is an accident, or if Haninan somehow knew she was supposed to be here. She does not really see how he could; it is not as if she looks like the sort of person who belongs to it.

She would not have thought there was any place in the city where she might look like she belonged. But having met her new friend, suddenly she is not so sure.

“I do not want to go back,” she confesses, glancing towards the beautiful gates.

Haninan nods, as if this makes perfect sense, and is not strange to him at all.

“There is a warm bed waiting for you. You are young, Ess, but if you want, that can be all that you take from this place, in the end. Time will pass, and you will grow, and then you will not need to stay here at all any more. Childhood is important. But it is notoriously brief, as well.”

That… is a heartening thought.

“It is very pretty,” she dutifully defends all the same, in an unconvincing mumble.

Haninan gestures dismissively.

“Personally I think it could stand some more colour,” he says.

Ess giggles in surprise.

The sound makes him smile so wide that the corners of his eyes crinkle.

“Can I stay with you instead?” she wonders.

Haninan’s smile turns wistful. She knows his answer before he says it.

“I am afraid I do not have suitable accommodations,” he tells her, which is a nice way of saying ‘no’.

“I do not need that much. I am very small,” she tries.

“But there are no warm beds where I live. Nor even safe patches of floor,” he tells her, apologetically. She thinks he might be telling the truth, and the thought makes her feel very badly for him. No matter how uncomfortable she might feel in the city, at least she has a nice place to sleep.

“You could stay with me,” she suggests.

“Alas, I could not,” he replies. Before she can protest any further, he reaches over and puts his hand on her head. “But I will see you again. You and I, we can be friends, yes?”

At length, she swallows down her disappointment, and sighs.

“I would like to be your friend,” she decides.

Haninan nods.


	17. Charity

Charity is helping!

It stays in the Dreaming, mostly. Sorrow tells it the Dreaming is safer now, and Charity thinks that is true, but someday it will have to go beyond. There is much help it can do here, but there is much, much more, it thinks, it can do elsewhere. And it must help. It must give, even though it often does not have a lot to share. It is learning - how to figure out what is needed, and how to obtain what is needed without causing damage elsewhere, and how to get it to where it can do the most good.

Right now Charity is helping another spirit.

Or.

Well, it is not a spirit yet. It is just… a tiny piece. Like what Charity was. Fortitude showed it the place where it has been put. Safe and secret. Charity’s not-sibling, made from a big spirit who broke into many, many pieces. This one is going to be different from Charity. But still similar, too. It needs to grow first, though. Charity was made from more pieces, and had more energy. This one is slow. Like the seeds in dreams, that turn bit by bit into massive trees.

It needs energy to get strong.

Charity can find that. Bits of wisps, and fruitful dreams, and memories. Tiny pieces of its own self, but it has learned it cannot give too many of those away, or else it will give and give and have nothing left. Someday Charity thinks it will do just that. That will be how it ends, probably; and all the pieces it has given will remember it, like little echoes. But it is new, still, and has much to do. So it must keep enough for itself, so that it can keep helping.

Helping tiny baby New Compassion.


	18. Inquiry

There are a few memories that linger from Andruil’s childhood.

She recalls the feel of being small enough to be spun around in her father’s arms. The way he would make sparks dance for her, and hold her up into the light, reaching with chubby fingers for harmless flares that danced across her palm.

She recalls resting her head upon her mother’s shoulder, and staring at her hair, and listening to her sing and hum. Her voice rising from her in soothing cadence.

She recalls the scent of blood and fire and shrieking, terrified, as strangers tore through their home. Feeling so helpless and small and more frightened than she ever had in her life, until all of a sudden her mother was there and strangers were dead and there was strong arms around her, pressing her face into a familiar shoulder.

_Do not look, little heart._

But she had looked. She had looked, and seen, all the dead eyes staring up at her as blood pooled upon the floor. She had peaked as her father had roared and burned the others. She had turned her head, and watched her mother tear more of them apart.

She always looked, when told not to. Always went where she wasn’t meant to.

She thinks of this memory, the first time the spirit drifts into her holdings. It is not one made by her. Those have a certain quality to them which she can read. This one lacks such things. It is more born of the wilds, she thinks. Of myriad dreams and ideals.

That it comes to them is unexpected in many ways, though not unwelcome, she supposes. Inquisitiveness has its uses to those who hunt, and of course, to those who must yet learn how. This Spirit of Curiosity is a jubilant one, as well; silvery and enthusiastic, flitting and fluttering through Andruil’s halls, like a shaft of moonlight that has run amok.

It is beautiful.

Part of Andruil cannot help but wish to catch it in a vessel, and keep it in her chambers, there to spill its beautiful light forever more. But then it would not dance or flutter, or ask its myriad and lyrical questions, and she thinks in this rare case that the trophy would not be worth the loss.

Still. She finds herself looking for that light, whenever she returns from her long campaigns. It is rarely hard to find. Inquiry is always eager to be told of the goings on in places it cannot visit, and of Andruil’s activities while she is away.

One particularly bad battle sees Andruil afflicted with a poison, that takes weeks to work its way through her system. She withdraws to one of her fortresses to recover, and as she rests, she is found by Inquiry.

The spirit eyes her critically, looking over the telltale signs of her ill-health. It pokes and prods and questions, and if it were anyone else, Andruil thinks she would have chased it away the moment it appeared. But instead she finds herself staring at the silvery wisps of it, and leaning into the soft glow of its touch.

“I wonder what it would be like to kiss you, pretty thing,” she whispers.

The question merits a blink. Then another. Then her lovely spirit leans forward, and presses the light of its lips to her own.

As it happens, it feels like kissing a butterfly’s wings.

Andruil recalls that from her childhood, too. Right before she pulled them off.

The spirit withdraws, but that is the start of it. She hears rumours of the new direction its musings turn to. Questions of what things feel like, of what can only be done with flesh and blood. In her dreams the spirit comes and follows her, drifting in and out of her spaces in the Dreaming, stealing more kisses and puzzling over them, as if each one has somehow become different from the last.

It takes thirty years for the spirit to makes its choice, and make its request of her.

Andruil finds herself oddly conflicted at the thought of losing her moonlit companion. But she does not linger on the loss, for what comes of it is the most delicate beauty to ever grace her halls.

Inquiry embodied is graceful and slender, just as before, with hair the same colour her light had once been, and laughter that makes Andruil think of overflowing streams. She is bright and eager, fleet-footed and bubbly, always moving, always asking her questions; seeming almost to dance with her every step. So flighty for such somber times, and yet it brings her only fierce joy to see it.

But there are more campaigns to fight. Enemies to hunt, and blood to spill. Fifty years after Inquiry takes on her body, Andruil returns again to her holdings, exhausted but victorious in this bout. She retires to bathe and then to rest, sinking into the cushions near the roaring hearth in her chambers.

She drifts, not quite sleeping but not nearly awake, and between one moment and the next, hears a voice begin to hum. Narrow fingers thread through her hair, and something silvery fills the corner of her vision.

“I wonder what it would be like to kiss you, pretty thing,” Inquiry says, before soft lips brush across her own.

Tired as she is, Andruil cannot seem to do much but sigh into the gesture. She is the huntress. She is the pursuer, always, and yet, in the soft light of her chambers, she finds herself yielding to the gentleness. To exploratory touches and sweet coaxing, to lips that trace over her own before dipping downwards, to teeth that scrape across the skin of her throat, and slender hands which trail over her shoulders, and dip down towards her breasts.

“Have I caught you at last, my lady?” a sweet voice purrs from the side of her neck, as she reaches up, and yet only finds herself tangling one hand in the threads of silvery hair. 

She should turn this around, she thinks. Drag her soon-to-be-lover into her arms, and finally take her. And yet, all that escapes her is a breathy moan as deft fingers slip inside the smooth fabric of her robe.

“I think I have,” Inquiry says, before biting down at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. She gasps.

That sweet, melodious voice she has so long admired _growls_  at her, then; a sound which seems to shoot straight through her like liquid heat. A warm tongue laves over her new bite mark.

“You…” she manages to get out, shocked at herself, and at the audacity of her flighty former spirit.

Inquiry grins at her, shockingly smug.

“Oh, did you mistake yourself for the hunter here? When I have chased you from dreams? Pursued you so delicately for years?” she asks, drawing Andruil flush against her. “I fear I must correct you, pretty thing. You are my heart’s desire, and I have always aimed to capture you.”

Andruil has no idea what to say to that. Nor to the way her breath stutters at being called a _heart’s desire._  It makes Inquiry’s intent expression turn fond; makes her capture her lips again, and breathe more endearments to her whenever they part.

The effect is shocking. Andruil finds herself lost to her infatuation with this unexpected turn of events. However much she may have admired and desired Inquiry before, it pales in comparison to the flurry of passion which follows when they are finally lovers. This new preoccupation draws her from her campaigns at last; prompts her to permit others to take over some fights that she would have been racing towards, before.

Not enough to lose station or influence, of course. But enough to remember that there is a world beyond battlefields, and that there are excitements beyond the thrill of the hunt.

The years pass, of course, as years do. In time Inquiry becomes Ghilani, who becomes Ghilan’nain, who constructs mighty beasts that change the landscape of their conflicts; who lets Andruil chase her through darkened woods and deserts and rocky beaches, only to turn at the last minute and catch her pursuer instead. Her lover makes pretty halla that can crush the skulls of the unwary with a single kick, and hidden sea monsters that lie in wait for unwary prey, and giants that crash across battlefields.

Years and years pass, and the little slip of a spirit becomes a leader of the People. Becomes her heart, completely.

Andruil does not often linger on thoughts of Inquiry, from so long ago. But she finds her mind turns to them once more, when she sees Mythal’s Curiosity prowling down the corridor.

It had taken Ghilan’nain fifty years to start acting like a hunter.

This one, Andruil thinks, has somehow managed it in less than a single one; among the company of her mother’s soft and gentle people, who could not have possibly set such an example for her.

Hmm.

…Concerning.

“I need to talk to my wife,” she decides.


	19. Flawlessness

Thenvunin’s appearance is flawless.

_Flawless._

This is a well-known thing. He is the height of aesthetic fashion, and very near to the pinnacle of elven beauty. Lithe. Refined. Long of hair, delicate of feature, poised, but not weak. Like the elegant curvature of a perfectly crafted blade, glinting in the sunlight.

Anyone should be _ecstatic_  to have him in their bed. They should _revel_  in his magnificence, not look at him and sigh and go ‘are you just going to lay there like a dead fish, then?’

(Thenvunin objects to that criticism on principle, it was Uthvir’s idea to tie him up - what else was he supposed to do? And anyway, he looked _beautiful_  in ropes. Uthvir is just a contemptible savage with no taste, who is also, by the way, nowhere near as flawless as Thenvunin, and is bizarre, and pointy, and rampantly lustful. And smug. And utterly repulsive, of course, it must have been temporary insanity that caused Thenvunin to go to bed with them in the first place.)

He’s in the city for a week, attending to matters for Mythal, and it is _business_  that takes him to Andruil’s holdings. Uthvir is a high-ranking member of her procession, it is expected of him to deal with matters through them.

But it is another servant who greets him at the gates.

When he asks after Uthvir - purely out of idle curiosity - the dark-haired hunter chuckles.

“They’re shacked up with that squishy little peacekeeper of Elgar’nan’s, somewhere in the city. Went and found themselves a new favourite toy, it seems.”

‘Squishy little peacekeeper’?

_Squishy?_

Thenvunin recoils at the description. What sort of traits must that entail? What new depravity has captured Uthvir’s interest now? He makes a disdainful face, and swiftly concludes his business before heading back to Mythal’s estate.

Squishy.

No one would ever describe Thenvunin as ‘squishy’. And he would never want them too. Has Uthvir taken up with a puddle of some kind? Perhaps an elf covered in some perpetual coating of mud?

_Squishy._

He tells himself he is only observing the peacekeepers who wear Elgar’nan’s vallaslin more closely out of morbid curiosity. They are a motley bunch. Elgar’nan’s people usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of aesthetic conformity, though they are also dutiful and tend to know their place, at the least. He sees who few who might perilously be described as ‘soft’, before he chances to glimpse a warrior, heavily armed, who exceeds even that expectation.

Thenvunin stares at her.

She is not tall. And she is not lithe, nor sharp. She is round and more ample than is commonly preferred. Like a walking cushion, he decides. Like a, like a soft… pillowy… comfortable, well-endowed… not aesthetically perfect thing. With nice hair. And dimpled knees, that are by no means sleek and yet are somehow utterly riveting to watch move. And understated clothing that nevertheless seems to suit her remarkably well.

…Damn.

Turning on his heel, Thenvunin stalks off, and angrily reminds himself that he is _flawless._


	20. I Am Safe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt request of more of Ireth (June's mom).

She was a spirit once, too.

In the ever-changing progression of events, that detail often goes forgotten. But before the First of the People took on the first of their forms, and split the sky as dragons, they were spirits like all the rest. Spirits that lived without names. That sang in great harmony, and spread across the world; watching that space called Waking as it grew and solidified, and changed.

Change. It is such an odd concept. Before, when the world was new, and she was young, everything was constantly changing; and never changing. There was no way to know what change even was, because no truly consequential change had happened. And yet the notion of a static world, where one’s nature could not drift from moment to moment, where shapes and structures and even ideas were consistent, would be baffling. Beyond imagining.

Until it wasn’t. Until the Waking was suddenly as great and vital as the currents of dreams, and the First of the People broke through to it, and had to relearn the shape of existence.

Some of them were storms. Magnificent and terrible in their way. Some were drumbeats, battering against the surface of the world. Some were whispers, drifting up from the dark currents of the ocean. And some drifted, like soft clouds and gentle rain; like the clarity that falls in the wake of cleansing winds.

_I am safe._

This was the song she sang, to the newness of the world, when she finally came into it. Others had come before her. In their ignorance, they had ravaged much of it; they had broken the surface, and killed the tender things, and destroyed many wonders. She had lamented their clumsiness and cruelty; she had sang to the scared, wary eyes which watched her. _I am safe._ So that was what they called her.

Ireth.

She was a spirit, once. This is what she tells her tiny son, when he asks her how she came to be in the world.

“I was a spirit, once,” she says. “But I did not take a body, like the other once-spirits. I made mine myself, from my own spirit and the blood of the world.”

“Did it hurt?” June wonders, fiddling with his braids.

“Yes,” she admits.

Her tiny son looks up at her with worried eyes, and pats her snout.

“But you are alright now, right, Mamae? It does not still hurt?”

She smiles at him.

“Only sometimes, my dearest. And not for a very long while,” she assures him.

June considers this answer; obviously not quite the absolute reassurance he’d hoped for.

“If it ever starts hurting again, you tell me, alright?” he asks. “I will help you feel better.” Then he lifts up, and gives her a demonstrative, curative kiss on the nose. Her smile widens, and she nudges him.

“Alright, little heart. I will tell you,” she promises. “Would you like to fly?”

His eyes light up immediately, and his worries are forgotten. With a cry of immediate agreement, he makes his way towards her neck, and climbs up behind her horns. She makes certain he is settled, before she begins to lift up. The currents of air and the shifting of the world around them is not really like being a free form of the Dreaming.

But she cannot truly show him that.

This, though different… this is what she _can_  show him.


	21. Dirthamen and Sylaise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt requesting Dirthamen looking after one of his younger siblings.

Sylaise looks like their mother.

But… much tinier. And rounder. Dirthamen understands that this is normal for her sort of elf, though he has never seen it before. Andruil had been kept close by their parents while he and Falon’Din were in the thick of the war efforts. After a near-miss with peril in her early childhood, neither Mythal nor Elgar’nan had been willing to take risks with her. She had been much nearer to fully-grown the first time Dirthamen met her.

Sylaise, though, is still quite small. There are less than ten years to her life, and none of them have been spent in the oddly-passing time of the Dreaming, where moments can float for eternities or flood like raging rivers. It seems very strange to Dirthamen. 

Their mother had found a task that required her and Elgar’nan’s attentions. She had looked to her other grown children; to himself, and Falon’Din, and Andruil, and at last she had handed her second daughter to him.

“Keep her safe, and happy, and well-fed,” Mythal had instructed him.

Safe. Happy. Well-fed. Dirthamen had agreed, though in truth the tiny girl had come with an entourage of her mother’s allies and most trusted servants, who had more or less taken over the task of her diet and daily schedule. Still, Dirthamen spends what time he can with his tiny guest, who always seems to make the strangest demands of him.

“Braid my hair,” she insists.

Dirthamen does; but then she tells him that he has done it wrong, and makes him pull out the braids and start over, while she holds up a mirror and assesses his work as he goes along. She makes him put pearls in it, and then decides she dislikes the pearls, and has him use crystal beads instead.

“Kiss my doll,” she instructs him on his next visit, holding out an even tinier version of her Tiny Mother self. It makes Dirthamen think of dolls with dolls, but he obligingly presses the lips of his mask to the smooth, porcelain surface.

Sylaise pouts.

“No, you have to take the mask off! It is not a real kiss unless you do!” she insists.

“Why not?” Dirthamen wonders.

Sylaise stamps a tiny foot.

“Because!” she declares.

The situation seems to be on the verge of upsetting her, which would go against their mother’s instructions. So he takes off his mask. Sylaise stares intently at his face as he leans forward, and kisses the doll again, before replacing it.

“You look like Mama,” she decides.

Does he? He supposes he has been thinking enough of family resemblances, it is unsurprising for him to have adopted one for the moment.

“So do you,” he points out.

Sylaise nods; this is clearly something she has heard often enough, and has deemed an acceptable observation. She reaches over and pats the side of his mask.

“We are all very pretty. You should not wear this silly thing,” she tells him. “The world should see your pretty face.”

“My face changes very often,” Dirthamen admits.

Sylaise mulls this over. Then she reaches out, and lifts up his mask again.

“It is still the same,” she pronounces.

“Give it time,” he advises.

On the next occasion he visits her, she has been ‘in a dispirited mood’ according to Mythal’s servants. Dirthamen is not certain this is an accurate assessment. Sylaise has torn down the curtains in her room, and decapitated half of her dolls, and lit her bed on fire. This implies less a lack of spirit, to him, than an over-abundance of it.

“I want Mama! And Papa!” the little one insists.

Dirthamen nods, accepting this.

“Why have you destroyed the room?” he wonders.

“Because I hate it!” she tells him.

This is certainly unhappy behaviour. But, he supposes, it does make sense. It is the sort of thing Falon’Din would do. 

“You can have a different room,” he suggests. “One with more fire already in it.” She is Elgar’nan’s daughter, too, after all; however little she might look it.

Sylaise folds her arms, and looks poorly appeased.

“I want Mama, and Papa,” she reiterates.

Again, he nods.

“I would like them to be here as well,” he admits. They would probably know better what to do with this sort of situation.

Sylaise wavers a little, squinting at him.

“They are your Mama and Papa, too,” she observes. 

Dirthamen agrees; this is true. Though he has only ever been bidden to call them Mother and Father. He was not born cute and small, though. He wonders if the standards would be different if he had been.

After a moment Sylaise frowns, but seems more or less satisfied, for some reason he cannot quite perceive. She reaches over and inserts her tiny hand into his own.

“I would like a new room,” she decides. “With lots and lots of fire in it.”

Mythal’s servants are not quite so taken with the fire. Nor with Sylaise’s penchant for burning things in it. But it makes her happy, and this was their mother’s mandate, so Dirthamen considers his own choice to be the superior assessment of the situation.

“Fire is pretty,” Sylaise pronounces, the next time he sees her. She is in her new room, which is perhaps less suited to children in general, but seems to fit her particular needs very well. It is large, with three fireplaces that burn in different colours, and high windows that look out over a small indoor garden.

“It can be,” he allows.

Sylaise sticks her hand into one of the fireplaces, and giggles as the flames curl harmlessly over her fingers. She glances at him.

“Did Papa show you how to do this?” she wonders.

Dirthamen shakes his head. No. Most such tricks come innately to the Dreaming-born, and do not need to be taught. Sylaise frowns at him, though, and purses her tiny lips, and then walks over to him. She catches his hand, and tugs him towards the fireplace.

“Here. You just have to know the fire,” she tells him. “It is hot by its nature, and it burns because it is a lot like a living thing. It eats the air. But there is fire in you, too, and if you recognize it, then it will not hurt you. It will bend to you, because a living spirit’s fire is always greater than the…” she frowns, and her brow furrows. After a moment, she shrugs. “I forget that part. But anyway, the point is that you are much more powerful, so the fire will do what you want unless you _let_  it burn you.”

So saying, she shoves Dirthamen’s hand into the flames.

When his skin does not crack and burn, she seems very pleased with herself. She pats his elbow and tells him he is doing very well, and then bids him come and sit and be introduced to her new dolls.

On the last day of her stay with him, Sylaise asks him tell her a story.

“About what?” he wonders.

“Tell me about when you were little,” she commands, from her station amidst the wealth of pillows and blankets in her bed.

“I was never little,” Dirthamen says.

She frowns at him.

“Do not be difficult!” she scolds. “Even if you never had a little body, you were _little._  Tell me about what it is was like when you and Falon’Din were still being looked after by Mama and Papa!”

Dirthamen considers this. As he does, Sylaise sits up, and clambers over to him, and reaches up to take off his mask. She assesses his face quite critically.

“You look a bit gloomier today,” she tells him. “I still have not seen you look ugly, though.”

So saying she confiscates his mask, as he contemplates how to make a story of his early days of embodiment.

“Falon’Din took three days to figure out how legs work,” he recalls. “He was a little better with arms, but walking was very difficult for him. The first time he attempted to run, he fell to the bottom of a hill and thence into a river. Mother had to rescue him before the current swept him away.”

Sylaise giggles.

“I like that story!” she says.

Dirthamen considers this.

“It was distressing at the time,” he says.

“I have never fallen into a river,” Sylaise primly informs him. “And I have to walk and _my_  legs are still _growing.”_

That is a fair point, he supposes.

“Tell me more!” she demands.

It seems to be pleasing her. So he obliges; he tells her of the time he got stuck in contemplation for three days and forgot to eat, and the time Falon’Din got attacked by birds, and the time his face turned into a squid, and the time Falon’Din insisted that they had to hunt down every bird in the world and kill it, and the time a tree fell onto him.

And her tells her of the time, too, that he first found himself on a battlefield, cutting through their enemies with magic that made the ground tremble. Her eyes go wide at that, and she hugs his mask closer and demands to know more. What is it like to fight? What is it like to kill someone? Is it frightening? Or exciting? Does it hurt?

Dirthamen considers this.

“Yes,” he answers.

“Yes to what?” Sylaise asks.

“All of it,” he says.

She nods, as if that is what she suspected.

“Mama says I will have to learn how to fight one day,” she tells him.

“That is likely,” he agrees.

“Can you show me how? Like how I showed you with the fire?” she wonders.

Again, Dirthamen gives the matter some consideration. She is small, and her magic is unsettled; most combative elements would probably be unsuitable to her as yet, or else they would manifest in basic ways, as with the bursts of flame she already knows how to make.

“Do you know how to throw your gaze from yourself?” he asks.

Sylaise shakes her head; but she also scrunches her nose.

“How is that fighting?” she wonders.

“Being able to see all aspects of a battlefield is often one of the most important parts of a fight. It will tell you how to approach things; it will help you find your enemy’s weaknesses,” he says.

This seems to get her interest.

“How do you do it, then?” she wonders.

Dirthamen gestures to the mask.

“Put it on,” he advises.

She blinks at it uncertainly.

“But it is _ugly,”_ she protests.

“You only have to wear it for a moment,” he assures her.

Sylaise looks at him, and then at the mask, and after a long moment lets out a little huff of breath. She lifts it up, and puts it on. It is too large for her, of course, but she is perceptive enough to focus on lining up the openings with her eyes, which is what matters. After a few seconds he hears a tiny gasp.

“I… I can see…”

Dirthamen nods in understanding.

After a few minutes, Sylaise pulls the mask back off. Her little hands are shaking a bit.

“Do you… do you need the mask for that?” she wonders.

He shakes his head.

“No. The mask learned it from me,” he explains.

Sylaise swallows, and carefully puts the mask aside; much farther from where she’d held it before, towards the edge of her blankets. Then she promptly bursts into tears. Dirthamen blinks, taken aback, and wonders what has triggered this abrupt shift in mood. The air sours with distress, but no signs of pain, at least. Sylaise scrubs at her face with her tiny hands, and cries and cries, as Dirthamen wonders what he should do. He waits until it seems as though she has finished.

“What is the matter?” he wonders.

“That was awful!” Sylaise tells him. “And mean! It was a mean trick!”

Dirthamen hesitates; still uncertain of what he has done wrong, and whether or not reacting to it would make it worse.

“I am sorry. I did not intend to deceive you. I only thought it would be easier to show you how the magic worked if you experienced it for yourself, through the mask,” he explains.

“You wanted to scare me on purpose!” she insists, though. It does not seem as if she will be dissuaded from this notion.

Still, he shakes his head.

She picks up a cushion, and throws it at him.

“Get out!” she demands. “And take your stupid mask with you! I hate you! When Mama and Papa come for me tomorrow, I shall tell them how mean you were. Then you will be in trouble!”

Carefully, Dirthamen stands from the bed, and collects his mask.

“Almost certainly,” he agrees.

He supposes he is not very good with children, in the end.


	22. Naked in the Moonlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haninan and Ireth, way back when.

“Marry me,” Haninan asks, the first time Ireth kisses him.

She laughs. Tall and graceful and lovely, with golden scales on her skin and firelight in her eyes, she looks at him as if he is precious and hopeless, and a little baffling, at times. She trails her fingertips over his lips, and then kisses him again. He can taste the remnants of a honeyed sweet upon her tongue.

“No,” she says. But she is still smiling. Still holding him, and kissing him, again and again; so Haninan supposes he shall survive the rejection. 

~ 

“Marry me,” Haninan asks, the first time Ireth lays with him.

He had not thought he would ever want this. He knew he wanted _her_ , of course, but in what ways, whether as a dragon or an elf, whether in this fashion of intimacy or not, had not been clear until the first time she kissed him, and he felt a slow burning fire spark in his chest.

She is twined up against him, soft and careful, and more elven in her form than she usually cares to be. Her skin shimmers, forest wisps dancing around them; reflecting in the light of the grove she had brought him to. She is quiet for a moment. She has brought herself gently to him, but she is still vast, he knows. Greater than a hurricane, and older than a mountain.

Her heart is no bigger than his, though, where it beats in her chest.

“Maybe,” she says. 

~ 

“I am glad you did not marry me,” Haninan says, where he lies broken and dying on the edges of a canyon, a spear of fire burning in his chest. And unexpected ambush. An unfriendly clan. Ireth’s muzzle is covered in blood, and her eyes are wet with tears, but still. He is glad. It will be easier for her, this way. It will not hurt quite so much.

He raises a hand and brushes her scales.

When his eyes close, he does not expect to open them again.

But he does. Surrounded by spirits, and two of the clan’s most windswept healers, and Ireth, who is a very dragon-ish elf as she holds his hand and spills more magic than he has ever before witnessed onto him. 

~ 

“Marry me,” Ireth asks him, as he lies in a brightly-lit aravel, covered in soft things and still recovering from the ache in the centre of him.

Her hair looks like fire where it tumbles down her shoulders. Her skin is golden scales. Her eyes are cold and steady, determined and just a little frightened, he thinks. He takes her and kisses it, and holds it to his mouth a moment as he breathes in until he cannot anymore, and then lets all the air out again in a slow, steady rush.

“No,” he says. 

~ 

“Marry me,” Ireth asks, as he sleeps at her side; the warmth pouring from her dragon’s form more than enough to ease the aches of a long day’s work.

“No,” Haninan says. But he leans closer.

“Marry me,” Ireth asks, as the clan drifts through the twilight air, and he rests upon her back; safe behind her horns.

“No,” Haninan says. But he brushes a hand gently across her neck.

“Marry me,” Ireth asks, as she kisses him in the moonlight. As she wraps her arms around him beneath the summer sun. As she brings him books and flowers and treasures, trails her touch across his jaw, and buries her fingers in her hair, and rests her brow against his own. As the days grow long and short and long again. As the clan roams. As Haninan forgets the fear of death and grief, and walks in the light of her smile and affection.

“No,” he says, many more times.

In the quiet of their embrace, Ireth leans closer, and presses her lips to his temple.

“Please, marry me,” she asks.

Well.

That’s his restraint done. 

~ 

On a summer that lasts the length of three normal ones, and an evening the goes on for the length of four, Haninan marries Ireth. He dresses in the bright colours of the clan’s banners, with a long cloak that trails from his back, and golden paint upon his face. His wife needs no adornment, of course; but her dragon’s form is draped in banners, too, with gems strung from her horns, and orange paint that glitters and swirls over the contours of her head.

Spirits are summoned. They bathe together, and are dressed again, and Haninan spends the days caught up by her, and as she seems to refuse to let him go; and he does not come close to objecting. Love tangles and twirls between them; Fortune glitters and gleams at it wishes them prosperity. In the dim evening light, Glory arrives, and the clan stills as it shines and weaves among them. As it brushes a touch to Ireth’s brow, and then even to his own. Like a kiss from the sun.

Then the night gleams around them, and Ireth falls into his arms as an elf, and drags him into dancing. Light and seemingly endless dancing. She pulls away Haninan’s banners and most of the clan goes naked, weaving between flowers and trees, scattering towards the nearby lake, where they catch the light reflecting from the waters, and then carry it back to douse the dancing couple with. The bond between them is strong and well-woven. It sings in his spirit. It is so small where it is held within Ireth’s vast depths; but it flares around her same-sized heart, and he knows it means just as much.

He cups her face in his hands.

“You married me,” he says.

She laughs, and her tail twines its way around him.

“I did.”


	23. Flowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone wanted more insight to Mythal and Elgar'nan.

She was a dream, once.

She was Justice, and Justice was balance. The payment of things weighed against one another. Fairness. Costs exacted in repayment of crimes. Never more than would be required; never for longer or to a greater extent than was needed.

He has always been the other side of that.

Vengeance. Imbalance. The weight of emotions pressed against the weight of actions, in such a way that no payment could ever truly serve. For some things cannot be measured. For some crimes there is no balanced payment that would ever suffice; especially when viewed through the lens of pain and suffering.

But that, too, has its place. He, too, was a dream.

They were spirits, once. The world was simple, and so were they. Neither of them wished for bodies. But she asked them to come, and they could do little save answer. Right and Left hands. _Yes, you will serve._

Justice remembers the purpose of her cause.

Vengeance forgets.

But they are more now. Simplicity is gone. Balance is an illusion, and always has been, as the world tips and turns and spirals along its path; and they must dance along it, not steady and fulfilled, but turning and twisting in the winds of change. What is fair is not always wise, what is wise is not always good, and the costs can come from nothing. From nowhere. A turn of fate and a hundred lives are lost in pointless disaster. Another, and a hundred spirits are born in mirth and light and laughter.

She burns with vendettas. With fires and fear. The hardness in her, the judge of unfairness and cost and retribution, is cold and ruthless as steel.

And Vengeance brings her flowers.

He cannot pluck them with indelicacy. He cannot approach them with his fire, or they will burn. He cools himself, gentle and calm, and his fingers close around the stems of wild-growing blossoms. And he brings them to her, and barrels and buckets and loads enough to drop them over her head. To send the spilling into the sea at her feet, along with the glittering shells cast up by the tide. In endless supply he showers her with them.

For vengeance, retribution is not about balance. Punishment must light a flame in the void create by suffering and loss. To fill the darkness with something more than hollow agony, even if it is only wrath and ruin, boiling at the end of fathomless pit. Satisfaction only comes with the fires lick at your fingertips, and you know that the ruination of others has cost them more than they ever imagined.

And from this he learns. And he knows. And he shows her. He casts her in flowers. The fires of vengeance cannot heal the wound they fill. The petals of flowers cannot soften steel. But cast enough upon the hungry wind, and still, it changes.

“There are not enough flowers in the world,” she tells him, sadly.

“No,” he agrees. “But that will not stop me.”

And the petals drift into the foam.


	24. Touch (NSFW)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the following prompt: "Pride discovering the wonders of the prostate? (Either alone or with Lavellan?)"

He loves her touch.

The touch of her lips. So soft and steady, so hungry where they press to his own. So fond where they caress the curve of his cheek, or the bridge of his nose, or even the delicate skin of his closed eyelids.

The touch of her body, where it presses against his own. Warmth that spills through layers of clothing and armour. Her limbs around him as she hugs him tight. Her bare figure flush against his own where she lies atop him, or beneath him, or beside him. Her cheek pressed against his shoulder. Her breasts soft upon his chest.

The touch of her hands. Fingers threading through his own. Tangling in his hair. Catching in the joint of his elbow, to walk close, or to haul him out of the path of perceived danger. Palms flat against his chest. Curled around his shoulders.

Trailing down the skin of his stomach, to cup him, and stroke him, and line him up for her lips to kiss. Her tongue to caress.

He loves her touch when she reaches for him as she comes. When she catches his wrist as he walks by. When she kisses the tip of his ear, or works her fingers into his belt, or playfully smacks at his backside.

And he loves it, too, when she has him bend over, and delves it deeper there.

“Tell me if it gets uncomfortable, or you want me to stop,” she instructs, before bringing slick fingers to play with a new part of himself.

It is strange, at first. Not bad. Not painful or unpleasant, really. The tight muscles and delicate skin he has there are… unaccustomed to this sort of exploratory touch. But still, as she goes along, carefully working him open, he finds that he likes it. The stretch of his skin there is an interesting sensation, different from, ah… the other times when it is generally seeing… activity. Her fingers are warm and she sinks only the smallest one into him, at first. Her free hand brushes down his thighs, and strokes him, and toys with other delicate areas of his flesh.

He is already quite thoroughly flushed, but he feels himself colour even further when she ventures a broader touch, and presses a kiss to the slight indent on the side of his buttocks. And then she brushes up against a point inside of him and he lets out a soft gasp. His nerves tingle, and unexpected jolt of pleasure rushing up to make him twitch. His toes curl as the heat in him doubles many times over.

She presses in a little more firmly, right at the perfect angle to caress him from the inside, and he gasps again. His legs shift, and hands clutch the bedsheets more tightly. She opens him up more, and works another finger into him. Coaxing sparks and fits of a deep, arresting sensation that is simultaneously strange and undeniably _pleasurable._ Like molten heat slipping beneath his skin. Those careful, patient fingers ply him until he’s pressing firmly back against them.

Her other hand strokes him and holds him, moving slickly over his firm flesh. She is in him and around him, the sensations are stunning in their effect. He loves her touch. He wants it everywhere, he would give her every inch of him, always, just to feel some part of her brushing against some part of himself. She whispers adoration to him as presses heat through him, and the only response he can manage is an incoherent gasp; a vague and broken endearment.

He comes, crashing, caught between her hands.

For a moment he forgets how to breathe. How to do anything except melt into her hands, slack and spent and still burning, somehow. Still hungry for more.

She kisses her way up him.

“My love,” she calls him, as he remembers how to take in air, and how to drag her into his arms. Tumbling into a languid heap of limbs at the side of the bed. She laughs as he presses haphazard kisses to whatever parts of her he can find.

He loves her touch.

And he loves her.


	25. Ambition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone wanted Falon'Din's perspective.

One day, the world will bow to him.

This is the end of the road that it is on. This is the outcome which Falon’Din will achieve. There is nothing more precious than the lives of the People, and he will own them. All of them. Their wealth will be his power, and their reverence for him will guarantee his eternal dominion. And he will take what he wants, as he pleases. He will make concessions to no one; he will bow to no one; and he will share power with no one.

But he will have his favoured.

His favoured servants. His favoured family members. Those who come the closest to comprehending his destiny. Those who do not stand in opposition of his path to greatness.

Still. It is not enough. Close is not close enough, sometimes. They do not understand.

No one _understands._

 _…Nearly_  no one.

He sweeps from the sacrificial chamber, still shaking with the remaining power of his latest tribute, and sets out orders. In a few hours his accompaniment has assembled, and they make their way to his brother’s palace. Through the crossroads, in the diminishing light, until they are upon his doorstep. Dirthamen’s people greet them and mention some blather about them being unexpected, but Falon’Din does not care. He will own their lives one day, too, and then he will take each and every slight and inconvenience they have caused him from their hides. 

His bones shake with the brittle remnants of the spirit’s broken essence, running through him, heightening everything. Every glory in him. Every weight.

Every weakness.

He wants his brother. 

He finds him in his chambers, staring at a wall.

“No one understands!” he snaps.

Dirthamen tilts his head.

“No one can see! I am _meant_  for this, I am driven for it. The fate of the world is in my hands. But even Glory itself could not comprehend my burden of destiny,” he rants, pacing the length of his brother’s chambers.

Dirthamen keeps staring at the wall.

“Look at me!” he snaps.

“I am,” Dirthamen says.

Of course he is. Looking through all his strange paths. Falon’Din reaches for the places where they are connected, and traces over them. His burdensome brother. But they were born together. He will keep Dirthamen in the shadow of his greatness; no one will ever again mistake who stands at the forefront between them. And his brother will be with him. Always. He will understand. He will be safe and dark and he will belong to no one except Falon’Din.

“You set me on this path,” he says; as much a reassurance to himself as a reminder to him.

Dirthamen drops his head.

“Yes,” he agrees.

Falon’Din draws in a deep breath, and lets it out again.

Some of the frustration in him abates, fractionally.

“You should come. Give your followers to me, and come live with me again,” Falon’Din says. “You are no leader. You flounder at this; it would be better if you let me have it all. If you came and helped me.”

Dirthamen is quiet.

Falon’Din paces behind him.

“It is inevitable, and you know it is inevitable, because you know the path I walk. Why delay it, then? Why hold yourself apart?”

“You are not my only obligation,” his brother says.

Falon’Din’s temper snaps.

His magic flares, but of course, his brother is expecting it. Their energies twist and slide away from one another, cracking against a far wall instead. He moves, and reaches for Dirthamen, and his hand closes around the back of his neck only to find that his grip is filled with slackened fabric. An empty mask slides to the ground, and clatters upon the floor.

A hand closes around the back of Falon’Din’s neck, in turn.

“You wanted me in your shadow,” Dirthamen says.

Falon’Din tenses for a moment, almost furious; but then he lets out a breath, and a laugh instead. He turns, dislodging his brother’s hand on him, and pulls him close with a bruising grip. As always, the inept creature is stiff as a board, halfway out of his body still.

No matter how far he wanders, though, he cannot escape their connection.

Not ever.


	26. Taking Wing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potential Uthvir spoilers apply!

They are quite pleased with their wings, when they first master the modification to their shape.

Andruil’s other high-ranking hunters wear animal parts often. Horns and antlers, claws and tails. They manage the claws, first. And the teeth. Sharp edges to warn off their enemies. But they do not see anyone else with wings. They think, then, it will be a good way to make a statement. Wings that are large, and can make _them_  look larger, That can cast long shadows, and stir up strong winds.

When they show their lady, she smiles at them.

All teeth.

“Oh, that is lovely, my pet,” she purrs, circling around them. Her eyes roving across their feathers. When they move to fold the wings in, she catches one. Stretches it out, instead, and looks it over. She runs a hand across their interior feathers, all the way down to where they sprout from the skin at their back.

She is still smiling. But something in her gaze is making them, uneasy, now. They swiftly review their interactions up until this point.

“I had hoped it would please you, my lady,” they say.

“Yes,” she agrees. “I am always so pleased whenever you display a talent. Particularly one of this magnitude. How long did it take you to manage this, pet? You must have been practising,” she muses.

“Only for a week,” they say, worried that she might be irritated by their secrecy. “I only waited to show you until I could hold it for long enough.”

“A week,” she murmurs.

They think that might be the wrong answer. It will be a long time before they figure out _why,_  though.

“Yes, my lady,” they say.

She circles around in front of them, and brushes a hand down their cheek.

“They are a perfect gift, pet. I think I know just what we can do with them. Come with me,” she beckons.

They know better than to hesitate.

But still, they feel a note of trepidation, as they follow her down the hall to her chambers.


	27. Golden Mirrors

When Sylaise is very small, her mother is the most beautiful person in the world.

When Sylaise is somewhat older, her mother is the most powerful person in the world.

These traits are not unrelated to one another. Though sometimes, people act as though they are. As if her mother’s particular style of beauty is not considered _the_  style of beauty, precisely because she is powerful. As if her mother is not powerful, in part because so many people are so pleased to look upon her. To bask in the radiance of her presence. To find her smile rewarding, her approval like a fond and indulgent pat across one’s spine.

When Sylaise is fourteen, her mother gives her a mirror. A beautiful, golden mirror, with a woven handle, flecked with tiny blue and green gemstones. The glass is pure and clear, and shows every feature of her in such fine detail. And Sylaise looks into that mirror, as she learns her own beauty. When she is well past fourteen, she will sit in her private chambers, and stare into the mirror. And she will practice changing the colour of her eyes. The tone of her skin. The shape of her lips. The shade of her hair.

Her mother is the most beautiful person in the world.

Sylaise tries, for a time, to become a different sort of beauty. The opposite to her mother. She trades her willowy frame for a rounder one, soft where Mythal is sharp. Her straight hair for waves. Her dainty mouth for a wider one.

Some features, she cannot change. She always looks like her mother’s daughter. But with dark hair she sits and stares into her golden mirror.

“It is better not to compete in matters of appearance,” her mother tells her, in approval. Warm and fond, as she brushes her fingers across Sylaise’s cheek, and then bids her good night.

And it is funny, Sylaise thinks. Until that moment, she had not considered them to be competing at all. At least, not consciously. But in that moment, she realizes that they have been. Ever since Sylaise finished growing. That her beauty, up until she began to change it, was precisely like her mother’s.

But less.

And this, this veering off of hers, might be read as a forfeit. A concession, that she cannot compete in such matters of beauty with her. That she is no longer going to try.

Sylaise stares into her mirror.

Slowly, she chances back. Her frame grows more delicate, more thin. Her softened edges sharpen. Her tresses shift in shade. Her mouth turns dainty, and she scrutinizes the results. Compares them to her mental image of her mother, and then again, to the image of what her mother is _like_. The impression that she creates, that disguises any hint of flaw or lingering inadequacy. So that when people recall her, they do not recall the odd lines at the sides of her mouth, or the thinness of her lips. They recall the striking light of her eyes, and the grace of her movements. Fierce brilliance wrought into physical form.

She can do better than that, she decides.

Her mother might think this is a battle already won.

But she did not raise any of her children to lightly accept defeat.


	28. Everlasting Glory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains spoilers for the LG chapter 'Elven Glory'.

Once upon a time, there lived a great and beautiful spirit.

The elves called it Glory, for it was born from the greatness of their people. But what defines greatness? For one’s conquests can be another’s ignominy, and Glory was not the success of any one elf, but of all of them. In the vast tapestry of the Dreaming, it was all that which elves and spirits alike could share in their accomplishments. That which anyone could take pride in; could find strength in. It was ever fleeting, and rarely in one place for long. But when it came it carried a radiance with that brightened all the world, Waking or Dreaming, and made every elf who beheld it feel large and small at once.

There were some who wished to keep that radiance for themselves, though. They wished to have Glory, to cage it, to keep it. They did not understand that to do so would be to deny its very nature.

It was Falon’Din who sought Glory most fiercely. It was Desire who knew the want for it, and knew also why that want was corrupted. It was Andruil who wished the accomplishment of catching it, and Ghilan’nain who desired a prize that could free her from Falon’Din’s ire.

And it was Mythal, who loved Glory, too, who told them how to catch it.

Andruil hunted the spirit, and Ghilan’nain crafted a body for it. Elegant and beautiful, meant to hold all the great eddies and floods of Glory’s power within it. She drew the wards to seal it upon the body’s back; and drew the markings of Falon’Din upon its face. Its skin was gold and soft, its hair flaxen and silky. Its features were perfectly formed, almost unnerving in their sheer beauty. Almost dull in their lack of variance. The eyes she put into it were blue and bright, and the shape she chose was delicate. It was meant to be an enticement to Falon’Din, after all. And so she made it in the form of his desires. Lest Glory undo her work, she made its form difficult to change.

But when Glory at last was caught and bound to that tiny, delicate body, the dullness persisted. The blankness rested heavily in its gaze. A confused, stunned bird, caged within itself. And even though taking Glory appeased Falon’Din, he was never full satisfied with the nature of his gift. For what singular elf could compare to the vast concept of the spirit? Even Glory, struggling and confused, could not make sense of what it was supposed to be.

It longed for freedom.

Desire came to it. Glory loved Desire, for all the small desires of the world could lead to accomplishments, and these things were what had come together in the Dreaming to help make it grand. And Desire loved Glory, for it had touched her heart, and she wished it to be free again, to be what it was happiest being. What it was meant to be, as part of the world. Spirits such as Glory, they are spirits which are not meant to be contained by either Dreaming or Waking.

But when Desire left to try and find a path to Glory’s freedom, it did not return. And so Glory was alone.

On a battlefield, the last thread tethering it to any thought of life was broken, as an arrow struck the binding spell upon Glory’s back. And though it could not fly free, it could free itself enough to break apart. All the scattered pieces of it flew to the Dreaming, or were caught by scavengers, or simply dissipated into the clouds above the battle. The body had been bound to fell, wounded and spiritless.

But not dead.

The blow had not been fatal, after all.

Several of Falon’Din’s people dragged the body away, and were convinced by a contingent from Ghilan’nain to trade it back to them in secret. For their lady had worked hard on the form, and would be interested in its fate. They healed its wounds, and were surprised when the body woke, to see the same confusion that had once rested in Glory’s gaze. The spiritless creature even carried the memories of serving Falon’Din; of being Glory. But there was none of Glory in it. Only echoes and remnants, that were sure to fade in time.

Still, Ghilan’nain was fascinated. She took the form apart and put it back together again, trying to deduce the fullness of all that had transpired. In its back she found a single shard of Glory, dormant and well past hope of regenerating. She found that the body cleaved to the shard, nevertheless; that it would hold it if she permitted it to, but when it did nothing of interest with the energies within, she took it and instructed her servants to add what meagre stores were in it to the wellspring of her palace.

One of the young servants had pity for their lady’s creature, though, and took the shard back to it instead.

A little piece of Glory, that the spiritless creature hid away.

When Ghilan’nain was satisfied that she could gain nothing more of interest from her project, she decided to make a gift of it to her wife. Andruil had greatly admired the form she had made for Falon’Din, lamenting its ultimate purpose and inevitable loss. And so Ghilan’nain had the creature cleaned up, and decorated. She took the marks from its face, and sent it along with several other gifted pets to entertain her wife.

And Andruil was very entertained.

For a time.

When she grew tired of her new pet, she passed it on to her highest ranking hunters. Ghilan’nain’s only stipulation had been a request to know when the creature finally ceased expressing emotion, and ran out of the echoes of Glory’s presence. Keeping that in mind, then, it was not to be killed. It was kept in a little room near her menagerie, until it was needed. It became a mild disappointment to Andruil, though, to think of Glory, and of how much more she would have enjoyed having the spirit, rather than only the remnant.

“It is your fault, you know,” she told her pet one evening. “You are the body that was built to house a great spirit. But that spirit hated you so much, it killed itself rather than remain. My Ghilan’nain built you so beautifully. What did you do, to make yourself so undesirable a host? What flaw did she overlook, I wonder, that you killed a great and wondrous thing to which nothing in the world can ever compare?”

Her pet shook its head.

“Mistress, I did not hurt Glory,” it said.

“Of course you did,” she replied. “There are plenty of spirits which happily reside in bodies. Come now, pet. My Ghilan’nain worked so hard in making you. Tell me where she went wrong. What is wrong with you?”

To her amusement, the creature contemplated that matter a great deal. There was no way it could know, of course. But it was interesting to see it try and puzzle the matter out. Andruil was amused at how readily her pet accepted fault. How eager it was to please. _Such a stupid creature,_ she thought.

And yet.

Days passed and turned to years, and the emotions did not fade. The memories did not vanish. The magic grew more controlled, but the creature did not lose its capacity for such. To the uninformed, it was often mistaken for an elf. Admittedly an unmarked slave, but even so. Not a construct. Not a beast, or a spiritless husk.

It amused Andruil, to see her wooden duck taken for a real one by the foolish. But there were potential consequences to consider. And so she resolved to kill it, and simply tell Ghilan’nain that it had at last run its course. She would miss her pretty pet, but there were others, she thought.

Yet, on the evening when she had planned to put it down, the creature spoke to her beseechingly. It flattered and cajoled. It spent the night entertaining her most thoroughly, and when she lifted the blade to it, it fell to her knees.

“Please,” it said. “Please, my mistress. You say I killed a great and wondrous thing. And I would say to you, that this is the calling of your hunters. That the flaw in me is that I have always been made to serve you. If my offense is a lack of spirit, then let me do as any hunter should – let me catch one. If I can catch a spirit for myself, I would beg you bind it to me; and I shall serve you faithfully until the end of all the world’s days. As I am meant to. As I am made to.”

Andruil stilled. This notion held such great appeal to her, as her wife’s beautiful construct knelt at her feet, that she granted its request.

And so her pet set out to catch itself a spirit. It took to her hunting grounds, and set traps; and scoured the Dreaming. It looked, in truth, for Glory, or some remnant of it. It baited its traps with the shard of the spirit, hoping like would call to like. But the remains only deterred most spirits, who had known Glory, and who were deathly afraid of sharing its fate. Those that evaded the construct called to it. _Wicked creature. Wicked hunter. Broken thing._

_Abomination._

The construct feared it would fail.

So it was only in the end, in the greatest moments of its terror, that at last a spirit came to it. A small spirit, as warped and lost as the construct creature. For it had once been something kinder, born of Andruil’s better qualities. It had never been very great, but ever after it had first manifested, it had been diminished by the world around it, and by Andruil herself, until it had warped into little more than Fear.

But still it recalled that it had once been otherwise. That it had once known compassion, and sympathy, and kindness. And in Andruil’s pet, it saw scant signs of what was left of that; of what mercies Andruil could still show.

Fear made itself at home within the construct. No binding wards were needed, as it flooded the flesh, and filled out its shadow. The abomination left behind plucked up the shard of Glory from its traps. 

When it returned, the result was more than Andruil had ever dreamed it could be.


	29. Spirit of Grief

To be an absence, to be a loss, is a strange thing to come into existence as.

Grief is never born without cost.

It cannot be.

The spirit is dark and vast and deep. In the moment it is born, in the cascade of power that rends one world apart, and restores another, it sinks deep into the layers of the Dreaming. Like a knife. It is the strongest feeling carried through the maelstrom and the chaos.

Grief.

Loss.

There are many ways in which spirits can be born. But to make a powerful one requires a powerful feeling. It requires energy, And it requires an abundance of sentiment, even beyond that of the originating emotion, in order to take root and grow. To feed off of such sentiments, and solidify its being a part of them. To know what it is, and _why._

Grief is abundant in this world, just as in the other. It is born between, and almost swept off by the currents of that transition. But it finds an anchor in its originator, and it follows her instead. Follows through brightness, and darkness. Fire and cold. Pain, and numbness.

Grief can burn. It can scream. It can sink, like a cold rain, through all the layers of one’s dreams. It can linger, and once it is born, it finds itself resilient. Where there is loss, it persists. A shadow. An echo. Unwanted, it knows, but it also must be. Even when she tries to feel nothing at all, it is still there. In the nothing. It is the lack that makes up such vital parts of itself.

It follows. Unwelcome but undeterred. Through palaces and pathways, to gleaming cities where it feels itself lingering in dark corners, and dim shadows, and silent rooms. In the tavern it finds itself in a little child’s toy, tucked away in a box in a storage closet. It passes through gleaming streets, and finds itself, too, in candles lit by careful hands. In the altar stones of sacrifice. In the turning mechanics of a prison tower, and the portraits of artisans who paint faces they can no longer speak with.

Down deep in the bones of the earth, it is everywhere, too. It cannot follow so well there, where the air feels different. Where dreams are split by running currents that pass through them as surely as flooding rivers might bar a forest road. But still they can find what they embody. Still, there hear it echoing in names, and suffering. 

Grief calls for those who cannot answer.

It speaks to the loss, to the suffering. It is a testament, it decides. That is what it is here for. That is why it must be, why the pain happens. It is a testament to the worth of what is gone. To the pain of those who have survived, but not unscathed. It hurts because injuries must. A body’s pains call out to make their damage known. A soul cries with Grief, because this damage, too, must be known.

It is a vast spirit, in the end. New but abiding, and strong. It could increase itself. The more grief is caused, the more Grief will grow. But it sees no point in that. It is not Vengeance, nor Hunger. It has no desire to spread, but it does wish to be known. It feels like it must be, for some reason. Like that is vital. It tries to reach for the one who carried it with her, the one who made it, but all these efforts result only in nightmares and confusion.

It can feel the weight of those who were lost. Those who yet linger, in strange places beyond, and try to leak back into the world. Shadows that do not know their names. That do not know anything beyond pain; but Grief can feel that, too. Grief can offer context. It knows why they are suffering.

It tries to tell them.

_Home is gone. You are gone. Death came, and swept up many precious things._

The lost cannot answer it, though. Cannot seem to truly hear it, either. Other spirits shy away, fearful of the weight of Grief. Of how it might crack apart some vital piece of them. But it is fine. They can shy away, can flit off through their dreams. Grief comes, anyway. It is not quick, but it can be sudden.

It finds a woman standing amidst the shards of an old and dear friend. Death. Destruction. Sacrifice, and cost. The loss of Compassion is a wound in the Dreaming, and Grief knows it will be mourned further and wider than the woman now supposes. The loss of it is thick within her. Burdened with memories, of friendship and care, of comfort, and other losses that haunt her most assuredly.

She grieves over what she has done.

She invites Grief, inevitably, into her presence. By her own actions, she creates a misery she knows she must face.

“Did I make you, too, spirit?” she asks it, and Grief finds itself acknowledged openly; even if not by name.

“No,” it says.

“Then you are not welcome here,” she tells it. “I do not need your help to understand what you embody. I am familiar enough with it, by now.”

Grief wonders.

It knows itself. It is vast, and persistent. It lingers, and it can grow, and by inches it can diminish, too. It is a marker of cost, but it does not, it thinks, always have to be paid. It does not understand this woman’s grief. It was born from a magnitude of loss that came from failure. It understands this; that there are forces in the world which are stronger than others, and that these can rend and tear, and inflict grief upon those incapable of stopping them.

It does not understand this sacrifice. It does not know why it is here, when it is unwelcome. Why this loss has been chosen, when it is unwanted.

But still.

It will call the name of what is gone.

“Compassion,” it says.

The woman’s fist clenches.

“Go away, spirit,” she commands, in a soft voice.

Grief goes.

But it does not go far.


	30. Spirit of Justice

Justice is a big idea.

But it is, at the moment, a very small spirit.

It is like Desire, it thinks, when it is born in the landscape of the Dreaming; amidst a shower of sparks that see the births of others. Some are snatched up, straight away, by the jaws of hungry spirits. Corrupted creatures that loom upon the edges of battlefields. That have been waiting for this, like vultures.

Justice remembers… very little. It recalls a concept of Desire, a shape of something virtuous, and the feeling of _not right_ and _must make right._  That is what defines it, in the end. Or how it tries to define itself, rather. The spirits that might help it with such a task are ones which is shies away from. It shies away from them all, at first, seeing predators at every corner. Knowing that it is small, and innately, that it is a thing which can be destroyed.

A dream that can be lost.

But it must not be. It must _not_  be lost, because Justice must be _done._  What is wrong must be made right. Those who do wrong must be stopped, and made to pay penance. Those who do right must be protected, and those who suffer must be avenged.

There was suffering.

There is no end of it, still.

For many years Justice wanders, and does not know the name for itself. The world is… tilted, it perceives. Slanted at the wrong angle, too steep, and so many things tumble down unfairly onto those below. It tries to right them, but it thinks there must be mountains that are easier to move. Every wrong it tries to right is replaced with twenty more. A widow in a small village dreams of her husband’s murder. Drowning, but not the accident which it had been deemed. The spirit finds the killers, and drowns them in turn.

It is only just.

But then, too, it is two killers dead but only one victim first murdered. Is that imbalanced, Justice wonders? But who could it have rightly spared, when both shared equal blame in their crime?

It does not feel wholly right. It does not feel entirely wrong, either. Justice does not know, and does not figure it out before the peacekeepers come for it. They bind it in darkness and carry it with them to the halls of Elgar’nan, who is large and wrathful and deems Justice a poor judge for the crimes of his people. But it is Justice; it knows not what else it can be, what else it can do.

“You will learn,” Elgar’nan decides.

Justice is chained.

Imprisoned, beneath the fiery god’s throne. There to witness his edicts, to come to know the greatness of his judgement, and to understand its own nature. To pay penance for the lives it took. And one day, it is told, it will emerge as a worthy servant of Elgar’nan.

One day.

When it learns.


	31. June Meets Sylaise

After his mother dies, General Mythal invites June to the resistance stronghold of Arlathan.

In truth, he has nowhere better to go. His clan is gone. His mother is dead, by his own hand, and his father has undoubtedly disowned him for that. Every last one of his friends is a corpse. There is no safe place for nomads, and while he supposes his reputation would keep all from the boldest from attacking him, not everyone would recognize him on sight - and besides which, he…

…He cannot take the shape again, if it comes to it.

He accepts General Mythal’s gracious invitation.

Arlathan is a strange place. The last time he visited it, it was a trade hub, and he was still a child. Still small enough to sit on his father’s shoulders, or hide in the crook of his mother’s wings. He remembers wooden walls and a wellspring shrine, and statues of the Moon Mother everywhere.

There are still hints of that place, when he goes to visit the Moon Mother’s namesake there. But the walls are stone, not wood, and where once the only buildings were a few communal halls, there are many more there now. Colourful brick and stone and gleaming glass windows, and banners from the nine allied clans flaring out above narrow towers.

General Mythal is beautiful, and greets him warmly. They have never met before. He is not certain what he is expecting, but the hero’s welcome that the stronghold greets him with is a surprise. He stares into largely unfamiliar faces, that nevertheless tilt towards him, and acknowledge his presence with friendliness, and respect.

‘Honoured June’, they call him.

It takes a week before General Mythal even speaks to him in terms that are not casual, despite the ongoing conflict still burning around them. He is waiting for her to ask. To ask about the dragon’s form. To ask if he will take it on again, to help in their campaigns.

To ask about his mother.

“Your father has earned some notoriety as a man of intellect,” Mythal says, when they are finally in conference with one another.

June assumes she is making small talk. Leading in to her real point.

“Yes,” he confirms, and tries not to think of the man. Tries not to wonder where he is, or think of him grieving. Think of him cursing June’s name. Regretting his son’s birth.

“Do you take after him?” Mythal wonders. “Are you a clever sort, June? You strike me that way.”

June pauses. Considering. If he claims that he is, that will probably seem like conceit. If he claims that he isn’t, then he’s implying a lack of intelligence in himself. 

“I have my fair share of intellectual pursuits,” he hedges.

Mythal smiles.

She asks him, then, about his interests, and about the stronghold. She seems pleased by his passing fancy for architecture, and promises him access to some of the blueprints of various towers and structures in Arlathan. They discuss building materials and landscaping and construction techniques, and craftsmanship and artisans and all these things that Arlathan is apparently sorely lacking in, despite being on the most over-developed settlements June has ever seen in his life.

“I am looking, ever, to the future, June,” Mythal tells him. “Campsites are not enough. Clans divide us. Wars like these are inevitable, and their devastating consequences unavoidable, so long as there is dissent in the vision of the People. There are dangers around every corner. But I would turn the world into a garden. I would cultivate the entirety of the land, so that every space is a space where any elf may walk without fear of their safety. Where none of us will have to bury our mothers again.”

June frowns down at the table before him.

“A laudable goal,” he commends, though his compliments feel hollow. He had not realizes that General Mythal was such an idealist.

Nor such a fool.

Mythal only smiles at him, as if she knows what he is thinking, somehow, but rather than taking offence, she is only amused. She offers him a place in her plans, and he tentatively accepts. He still cannot quite escape an impression of his mother’s voice, though. Whispering in his ear.

_These people are not your clan, little heart. Do not put your trust and safety in their hands._

A few days after that meeting, the stronghold raises up its highest banners again. The gates are flung wide, and another procession is let through. This one much larger than his own one-man trek had yielded. A woman in shining regalia rides at the head of a large group of soldiers. Most of them look tired and trail-worn, and freshly healed. Some empty mounts are pulled along by the group, carrying no luggage save a few scraps of some warrior’s gear.

But June’s attention is arrested by the woman leading the group. He is confused, for a half a moment. He thinks she is General Mythal. But then she turns, and his breath catches, and he realizes his mistake.

This woman is like Mythal, but with every feature refined. Her skin is without the slightest blemish; her eyes are brighter, and clear. Her hair is longer and more lustrous; her shape holds more curvature and grace. She is so astonishingly beautiful, it could only be accomplished by the dint of some concerted effort.

She is Mythal’s beauty exaggerated almost beyond reason.

June watches as she bids one of her accompaniment to sound a horn, and then calls out that victory has been claimed for the allied clans upon the Fields of Restless Streams. That the waters have run red with the blood of a slain feral Keeper, and those fiends whose foul deeds strip them of all right to name and acknowledgement have been slain in retribution.

Cheers go up.

Mythal goes to greet her daughter. Andruil?

No.

The other one. Sylaise. Sylaise, who stands next to her mother, and takes all that she has and refines it.

June feels an irrational surge of longing and jealousy at the realization of what this woman has so deftly accomplished, even if only in this one domain. This daughter of two mighty generals and war heroes, the forces which have united so many clans in a singular cause, has surpassed at least one of them.

By the time Sylaise has gone inside, June is not certain if he is more resentful or smitten.


	32. Servants of Sylaise

For as long as he has had breath to draw, Tasallir has served the lady Sylaise as her morning attendant.

Every day he wakes up upon the stroke of midnight. The first of his priorities, of course, is making himself fit to be seen. There is much to weigh in this question. His lady fashions the world around her in reflections of its grandeur, and what purpose she will turn her mind to on any given day can be difficult to discern - particularly when she is asleep. Tasallir would never presume to wake her with an offensive visage, however, and so he considers the star charts in his chambers, and consults with his own servants, and usually after two hours have passed, they will have settled upon an appearance suitable to both the seasons and the weather, and the trends of their lady’s interest, and, of course, the current decor of her chambers.

Then Tasallir will change his appearance, insofar as he can, to match the ideal. Where his mutability does not avail him, his servants make up the difference with paints and adornments. His stylist will dress him suitably, and by the time all of this is done, he will be fit to be the first thing his lady sees when she opens her eyes.

The first thing.

Almost every day.

This is an honour for which there is no comparison, in Tasallir’s estimation. On good days, the Lady Sylaise will grace him with a smile. On bad ones, though, her expression will falter. Should she then offer up some commentary or another on Tasallir’s appearance, he must wait until his duties have been adequately seen to before tending to it. There was one particularly grim morning when the Lady Sylaise noted a distaste for his hair ornament. Tasallir had been early to his tasks then, and had made to remove it immediately.

Such maladroit behaviour. He had never made that mistake again; it would not do to leave his lady troubled by his sudden undressing in her chambers. 

Even now, the memory of it haunts him.

He permits it to, for it keeps him always mindful of the proper procedures. He does not speak, for Lady Sylaise values silence most in the morning. He helps her from the bed, and changes her robe for her per her gestured command, and then he helps her with the task of styling her own self and choosing her adornments for the day. This is only the breakfast finery, though.  Other attendants will arrive, then, once it is time to go to the main dining hall. Tasallir will follow his lady. A silent sentry at her side, dining quietly as her breakfast attendant sees to her needs for the meal, and his own servants attend to his.

When that is done, the Lady Sylaise will retire back to her chambers, and Tasallir and the other attendants will help her into her day clothes. Talk is permissible by then, and so they will often discuss matters of the empire, and the city, and recent news. Things that weigh heavily upon Lady Sylaise’s mind.

Once his lady has been suitably dressed for the day, then, Tasallir is typically dismissed. There are rare occasions which merit changes in this schedule. When Lady Sylaise is travelling. When she is staying with her husband, or when a celebration merits a chronological reordering of tasks. But mostly, this is his honour, every day.

With his free time, subsequent to the completion of his duties, he seeks to better himself. As one who sits high in the regard of his fellow servants, Tasallir knows he must stand as an example of discipline and refinement. He is a work of art, as his lady once commended, and art must be flawless. Often he handles commissions in the city, venturing through the halls of various artisans, and ascertaining that all is being done to the most exacting of standards. Sometimes it is his duty to see to it that proper punishments are administered when they are not.

Few elves are as scrupulous to their duties as Tasallir is to his own.

_I hate taking commissions from that dead-eyed freak._

_Artistry. What does a former Spirit of Order know of artistry?_

_Do you think he even eats? I’d heard tell that he just absorbs sunlight, like a plant._

Few appreciate his commitment, either. That is why they do not wake Lady Sylaise every morning, he supposes. Though it is a shame, that between the administration of his duties and the renowned fickleness of artisans, that he has little time for the matter of socialization. He is not a lonely man, not when there is the honour of his duties to see to. His ladies approving face, every morning, is worth more than the approval of a thousand gossips.

He is not lonely.

But when his duties are done, he is still, quite often, alone.

~

Venavismi, or ‘Vena’, has been the Lady Sylaise’s evening attendant and bodyguard for two thousand years. Ever since the festival when, at a mere three hundred years of age, he had taken a poison dart meant for her lady. By the grace of her healers, Vena survived, and for his bravery and trustworthiness, he was appointed to this rank.

He has done his best to live up to it, despite his humble roots.

Every day, Vena wakes up at noon. He is greeted by the smiling face of his chief servant and stylist, on most occasions, and almost every day there is usually a disagreement over how long Vena’s morning run might be in order for him to make it back to the palace in time for his dressing.

“You may run in the courtyard,” his friend will say.

“Or,” Vena will reply. “I could run through the city’s pleasure district, and grace the souls working there with the inspiration to imagine that any of their clients will prove half so pleasing to the eye as myself.”

Vena is very beautiful, it must be said. Though not so mutable as most of his lady’s attendants. She had resolved this issue by styling the majority of her evening’s escort to resemble him, but still, he knows, it is important that he fit with the decor and styles and themes which she is employing. Embarrassing her would be a poor way to repay her generosity, and a good way to look like a bumbling fool besides.

Most days, he wins an hour long run for himself.

Then it is back to the palace, to wash off his sweat and be picked over and styled by whoever has been assigned to him for the day. Most of the time, he is only expected to follow towards the back of his lady’s procession, and keep an eye out for any dangers or potential inconveniences, or insults, to her person. He not need gleam with the radiance of her nearest evening attendants. But still, there are hours upon hours of dressing, and painting, and dying. His hair is straightened, or it is curled. His nails are filed, or coloured, or pressed with false covers. His ears are pinned back with glue or weighed with adornments; but most earrings are too heavy for the glue to work, and so the servants always seem to tut over how far they stick out.

“I must always be listening for danger,” Vena jokes. And they will roll their eyes, but they will often calm down, too.

Once it is all finished, he typically has only a few minutes to join the procession down to the dining hall. His lady will often greet him, especially, which fills him with a warm satisfaction. She is great and mighty, their Sylaise, but even the strongest can be felled by a well-placed blow at the right time. And if she goes, so goes all the beauty and majesty of Arlathan, and Elvhenan.

And everything, really.

It is a noble purpose which Vena has been called to. Incomparable, really. He is not only an attendant, not only a servant. He is a guardian. A guardian of one of the greatest treasures in all of the world.

After dinner, he will follow Sylaise to whatever meetings and discussions she must see to. A shadow behind her step, silent unless some danger or suspect activity catches his eye. He will keep with this until she retires, and then stand guard outside of her door.

Depending on who is on watch with him, this affords a chance for some conversation. But not too much. Not enough to distract from the potential dangers that are their very purpose in standing as lookouts, until the next shift of trusted guardians comes to replace them.

Then Vena has time, until he must sleep. Arlathan is often quiet at night, and most pleasant activities are restricted to daytime hours, when there is light and brightness and no need to be discrete. Still, it is better to have the alertness of being wakeful when such things are needed, than to rearrange his hours and risk losing it. So it goes. 

He often runs back to the pleasure district, then, if only for the distractions it offers around the clock.

~

Sylaise has many attendants, Tasallir knows. And given how much is required to help her in her great and wondrous endeavours, there is no question as to why. But though he is quite familiar with her full daily schedule and servant roster, it has often meant that he does not always know - or recognize - her other attendants on sight.

Usually, though, there is a general ambiance that is discernible to them. Give who they are, this is  _hardly_  a surprise. Tasallir’s old mentor once claimed she could spot an attendant of Sylaise simply by how they moved, and breathed, and made every gesture flow like the streams of light in the palace’s external walls.

This is something he has found to be largely true.

But many former attendants of his lady also often find themselves assigned to the pleasure districts, when they should falter in their tasks, or find themselves incapable of meeting them any longer. And so, though it is not often plainly spoken of, there is a certain correlation between the auras of many prostitutes and the highest echelons of Sylaise’s servants.

He can only blame that for the witlessness that ensues on a day when his usual schedule is changed.

“Tasallir,” his lady says, as she is being dressed in her day clothes. She motions for him to stand before her, and he does. Her gaze scrutinizes him carefully for a moment, and he worries that some unforeseen misstep in his aesthetic presentation has occurred, at some point during their transition from the dining hall. But then she nods, and he relaxes; for she seems satisfied rather than critical.

And she smiles at him.

“The autumn festival is coming. We will need more dancers for the opening displays. I have had reports of some new talents in among several individuals assigned elsewhere throughout the city, but I have no time to assess them myself. Vanity will provide you with a list of locations and petitioners. If you could take care of it this afternoon, it would be of great help.”

Tasallir does not hesitate to accept his assignment, of course. He is no dancer himself, but he knows what skills in both movement and appearance are required. He is also good at spotting an aptitude for following instructions, which, he suspects, is likely why he has been chosen for this task. Therefore it should be the chief trait which he assesses, he determines.

Though obviously, the others cannot be neglected.

He is given leave to make way from his duties early, then, to venture into the city. The lower reaches are, as ever, a disquieting prospect. The  _lawless_  might lurk there. But fortunately, he has no cause to go quite so far. The potentials listed are mostly in the upper city serving halls and entertainment and pleasure districts. He starts with the location nearest the palace, and works his way outwards.

Unfortunately, few of his initial auditions hold more than the most basic of potentials. For the choreography of the ceremony openings, quick thinking and an ability to follow direction are necessary, along with athleticism and aesthetic appeal. Most of those he sees in the serving halls have one or two of these traits, but not all. He makes inquiries as to their self-modification abilities, and notes down their strengths and weaknesses before moving on.

The entertainment district, naturally, proves better. There are dancers aplenty there, as well as musicians and performers of all sorts. Tasallir finds himself inundated with spontaneous petitioners once word gets around of what he is doing there, and after some consideration of the short length of his list of probable candidates for the event so far, he adjusts his schedule to accommodate them. It will be a late evening, he thinks, but he accumulates many more immediately acceptable names for the ceremony coordinators.

Still, the delay means it is past dark when he finally makes it to the pleasure district. The streets glow with lanterns, marking the buildings that are open to provide services. Where the district curves down towards the lower city, and thus the residents of lower-ranking subjects, the walls of the buildings grown thicker, and the windows smaller; and there is much more silence, to allow for discretion.

Tasallir does not look towards that road often. It is disquieting to see how many elves of higher rank make their way there, knowing that their chief motivation must be to solicit those with less recourse to object to their particular perversions.

If there is an area in which Tasallir questions his lady’s judgement, it is in maintaining so large and diverse a district as this for such lamentably animalistic urges. Even the more artful of erotic displays can only serve as wasted aesthetic to the ultimate end goal of senseless rutting. It almost makes it all the worse, to have costuming and music and fine fabrics set aside for such ventures.

But still. There are skill accumulated in this field that are quite applicable to the festival’s needs, so he keeps his eyes forward and makes his way to the first address on the list.

Scarcely has he made it past the gate before it opens again behind him, and an unknown figure sweeps forward and links their arms together. Tasallir halts more in shock than anything else. His outfit is a very artful arrangement, and it is rare for anyone to be so indelicate with his person as to _grab_ him. Even by the arm. The bells on his wrists jangle and some unfamiliar rogue with a recognizable aura grins at him.

The man is handsome, Tasallir supposes. He has jet black hair, and creamy skin, and very expressive eyebrows that are perhaps only a millimetre too thick. He is dressed in light, flowing attire that does not impede his movement much, and looks like it would be easy to remove. And his grip is very assured, as he catches Tasallir and falls into step alongside him, as if this should somehow be an acceptable and unremarkable breach of his personal space.

“You are in luck, beautiful,” the stranger says, grinning. “Because you get to spend tonight with _me.”_

Ah.

A prostitute.

“I am attending to my duties,” Tasallir asserts. But the man’s grin only widens.

“I just bet you are,” he says, waggling those eyebrows of his.

Tasallir swiftly removes his arm from the confines of the stranger’s grasp, now heedless of whether or not such rough treatment might harm the delicate configurations of the patterns on his sleeve. He feels a bolt of wild, perhaps irrational panic. That tone was utterly inappropriate.

“Hey, now,” the stranger says, blinking. Tasallir means to speak, to immediately decline his services, but he knows his voice will be rough if he does it now and he is accustomed to reigning in such impulses until the sound can be more pleasing to the ear. Of course, in this case, such courtesy is likely unnecessary. But in the brief surge of his alarm, he becomes muddled.

The stranger frowns a little.

“New at this?” he asks. “I have not seen you around here before.”

“I am not ‘at this’,” Tasallir finally manages to assert, straightening his shoulders and taking a step back. “I am no solicitor.”

“Well, obviously not,” the other man says. “That would be _me._ You really must be new at this. Well, have no fear, I have done it often enough that I can show you the ropes a little. Now the next time someone comes up and takes your arm and says they intend to spend the night with you, you can laugh. Smile. Or if you have someone else you need to serve later in the evening, say so. But do not make someone just feel _unwelcome_ like that.”

Tasallir stares, aghast.

This man is not a prostitute.

This man has taken _him_ for one.

“You have mistaken the order of events in play here,” he asserts, and when the man makes another move towards him, he backpedals swiftly.

“A little skittish for this place…” the stranger observes.

“That is because I do not work here!” Tasallir insists. “Not in any part of this district! I am a high-ranking attendant of Sylaise, here on important business that has nothing to do with you unless your name is on my list.”

The man blinks.

And then he grins.

~

Vena knows this game, of course. The ‘I am a very important person, not a servant of your pleasure at all, you salacious rogue’ game. He takes a few steps forward, while his target continues to step back; radiating soft waves of agitation. Very artfully done. He’s probably had some training on that.

“Your list, you say, o high ranking attendant of our beloved lady?” Vena wonders if this one even knows who he is. He is new, probably, so he might not. He keeps stalking forward until they are both off of the path, and his lovely little target nearly goes tipping over the fence behind him. The move graces him with a brief glimpse of a quite-shapely leg, and is just awkward enough that if Vena didn’t know any better, he would think it was an honest accident.

If this goes well, he might end up with a new favourite.

“Yes, I have a list!” the man snaps. “I am here to interview dancers! And if you do not stop right there, I will invoke my rank and have you dragged off for disciplinary action!”

…Dancers?

That is… odd enough to give Vena pause.

“You would have some time of it, trying to find anyone with rank enough to enact such punishments on me,” he muses.

“ _I_ have rank enough!” the strange prostitute insists.

Hmm.

“What is your name, then?” Vena tries, folding his arms and trying to figure out all over again just where this is going.

“Tasallir,” the man says. “And I would have yours as well!”

Tasallir… Tasallir…

Not ringing any bells. Well, apart from the cute little ones on his sleeves.

“I do not know your name,” he asserts. “But most anyone in this district can tell you about me. I am Vena – guard and attendant to Lady Sylaise herself.”

Vena punctuates his introduction, as ever, with a flourished bow.

Tasallir scowls at him.

“You are lying,” he accuses.

Vena scowls right back, now, just about at the end of his patience for these games with _that_ particular accusation.

“Now, a person could take that the wrong way,” he says, warningly. “I assure you, I am who I claim to be. Unlike you. And I think we have carried this a little too far.”

“Well, on that last note we agree,” Tasallir declares, and at last reaches for his belt. Vena is beginning to think that things have just gone from zero to a hundred rather hastily, but at least they are moving in a better direction than before, until Tasallir produces a piece of paper from a deftly hidden pouch at the side of his belt, and thrusts it towards him. “There! You see? I am here to interview dancers, on behalf of my lady Sylaise.”

Vena stares at him, and then down at the paper.

On it are indeed lists of names and addresses throughout several districts, as well as what seem to be assessment notes right next to them. Their lady’s seal is stamped across the top, marking it as an official assignment.

When he is apparently satisfied, Tasallir pulls the paper back.

Well.

“I thought I knew all of the attendants who worked these hours,” Vena says, still not wholly ready to concede that he has made any sort of faux pas.

Tasallir glares at him.

“Perhaps you might,” he says. “But I know the full names of every single attendant of Sylaise, and there is no _Vena_ on that list. You might think it is clever to impersonate one for the purposes of – of whatever it is you do with your time here, but-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Vena interrupts. “Untwist your underclothes, if you please. My full name is Venavismi. I am one of Sylaise’s evening attendants and guards. My shift ended not long ago, hence my arrival here.”

“My underclothes are none of your business!” Tasallir snaps. He looks a little wild-eyed. But after a moment the rest of Vena’s explanation seems to sink in, and he purses his lips in some obvious disapproval. Eyeing him carefully up and down.

After an awkwardly long moment of this, Vena spreads his arms.

“Shall I turn around?” he asks. “Do a little spin, perhaps? Pose?”

“…There is an attendant by that name,” Tasallir finally allows.

“Of course there is. It is me,” Vena replies, and does strike that pose. Just because he can. “The finest attendant in all of Arlathan.”

“No,” Tasallir says, stonily.

“Well, you cannot possibly think it is _you_ , if Sylaise is sending you on errands to the pleasure district in the dead of night,” he points out, folding his arms and suddenly realizing that they are, technically, standing on the grass square in front of one of the city’s more prestigious brothels.

“My errands began at _noon,”_ Tasallir tells him. “And because I take them seriously, and am looking to secure dancers for the upcoming autumn festival ceremonies in earnest, they have run overlong.”

“Certainly they did,” Vena scoffs. “I am positive that these errands did not offer you any other time-consuming _distractions.”_ In the pleasure district? He himself would not get between buildings without making at least one or two pit stops. Probably more, especially with some eager young dancing talents all wanting to prove their _athleticism._

Tasallir looks vaguely nauseated now, though.

So… possibly not.

Damn.

“Well, judging by your face I take it you are not interested in the prospect of laughing this off with a good roll in the yard?” Vena asks, just in case he has misread his options. Whether it is part of his assigned duties or not, after all, the man is still a stunner – almost half as good looking as Vena himself, in fact, with that pretty olive skin and those ruby red eyes – and if he has been working since noon, must surely be coming towards the end of his duty hours.

Tasallir just glares at him harder, though.

“If you take one step closer, I will report you to every applicable authority in the city,” he asserts.

Vena raises his hands.

“Fine. But you do realize that you are turning down the chance to have some of _this?”_ he gestures towards himself.

It is impressive, really. There are days when he would wager himself one of the prettiest elves in the city. Top ten, at least.

But it would stand reason that one of the nicest asses he has seen all day belongs to someone who is, apparently, so viscerally adverse to the notion of bedroom fun that he looks like Vena just waved a dead fish in front of him.

“I will live,” the stick-in-the-mud declares.

Then he straightens up from the fence, and delicately rearranges his clothing, and skirts as wide a range around Vena as physically possible while heading towards the brothel door. Vena watches him go. Partly because it is still a pleasant view, despite the recent souring of it; partly just to see if the man gets himself accosted again as soon as he opens the door.

Alas, though, whoever opens it gives him enough of a grace period to explain himself.

Vena considers heading somewhere else. There are brothels and residences all over the district that are open, after all. Certainly better entertainment than watching one of his ill-suited peers try to navigate the rest of the addresses on his list.

Or… maybe not.

After a moment, he shrugs, and follows.


End file.
